Susan Sarandon and Dr. Dino J. Martins | Writing Climate 2025 Artwork

Lannan Center Podcast

Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University is a literary, critical, and pedagogical undertaking devoted to the situation of poetry and poetics in the contemporary world. Based in the President’s Office, the Center brings attention to a traditional domain of academic research, but sees poetry as a current practice rather than as a field of historical research. The Center recognizes that “art’s social presence,” in the phrase of Adrienne Rich, is vital to contemporary culture; that poetry, or writing more generally, traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought: it reconfigures these fields according to the designs of imagination. The Lannan Center hosts Readings and Talks throughout the academic year. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

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Lannan Center Podcast

Susan Sarandon and Dr. Dino J. Martins | Writing Climate 2025

March 27, 2025 • Lannan Center

On Thursday, March 27th, the Lannan Center welcomed actress and activist Susan Sarandon to begin the final night of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate", with a reading from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The reading was followed by a conversation with biologist Dr. Dino J. Martins, moderated by author Aminatta Forna.

Dr. Dino J. Martins is internationally respected for his evolutionary biology and entomological research, biodiversity conservation work, and natural history writing, and he is widely known as one of Kenya’s leading biological scientists. Dr. Martins graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology from Indiana University in 1999 and worked on his M.Sc. in Botany at the University of KwaZulu Natal in 2004. He earned his Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2011 before joining TBI as a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University. Dr. Martins has taught in the TBI Origins field school every semester it has been offered since Spring 2011.

Dr. Martins' research in the Turkana Basin has included the description of new species of bees, including some of the most ancient lineages of bees known and the discovery of genera previously not recorded from Africa. Dr. Martins is also a Co-PI of the Turkana Genome Project, which brings together dozens of international scientists to look at the complex interactions among human genes, the environment, and adaptation in a world that is increasingly mismatched between our biology and technology/culture. Dr. Martins is actively building links and collaborations globally to expand the scientific frontiers of research at TBI. This includes building on the excellent fundamental research around human origins and evolution, to other disciplines that intersect with the fields of evolution and ecology, climate change, and the future of sustainable human existence and development.

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand, and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and most recently the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. Forna is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017. She is currently Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.