Lochlann Jain

As a professor at Stanford for the last 23 years, Lochlann Ross Jain has been fascinated by the ways that different disciplines, particularly medicine and law but also including fiction, art, history, and science, organize systems of legibility, rendering forms of violence visible and invisible in different ways at different moments. Lochlann has studied this question in three books, Injury (Princeton UP), Malignant (UC Press), and Things that Art (UToronto Press). Lochlann's work has won multiple awards and been supported by Guggenheim, NEH, NSF, Wenner Gren and others. Lochlann has presented scholarly and artwork worldwide.

Lochlann's research project, The Lung is a Fish and a Bird: A Cultural History of Drowning, offers the first book-length work analyzing how drowning must be understood as a complex phenomenon made sensical only in the context of the range of two and half centuries of medical, historical, colonial, news-media, art, legal, and literature archives. At Bogliasco, they will analyze current debates about the meanings attributed to migrants in light of the non-obvious, yet critical history of drowning that elucidates in the book’s earlier sections.