Book Launch with Hilary Bergen & Emily Doucet

Join Hilary Bergen and Emily Doucet in co-launching their first monographs, Dance Anima: Techniques of Vitality (Oxford University Press, 2026) and Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Duke University Press, 2026).

While the books take on different subjects, they both examine how the history of emergent media is also a history of what (and who) gets recorded by said media. Doucet writes about the narrativization of photographic “firsts” to interrogate the myth of the single author or inventor, and Bergen examines historical filmic, animated and digital “capture” of dancing bodies to show how dance’s kinetic power is always collective and impossible to own.

Both authors are interested in the allure and impossibility of media origin stories, as well as the power of celebrity in constructing such tales. Bergen, for example, writes of the legal battles of Loie Fuller, the turn of the century dancer obsessed with being seen as the owner of the “Serpentine Dance” — a dance bound up with new technologies of electricity and coloured lighting for stage, which fascinated pioneers of early moving pictures, and later proliferated in the many films featuring Fuller imitators on YouTube. Doucet, for instance, chronicles patent disputes between commercial studio photographers in the 1880s, revealing both a transnational story of technological diffusion and the collective creation of an archive of invention. 

After reading from their respective books, the authors will converse about shared themes in their work, including distributed agency, the mediation of invention, and the stories we tell about new technologies. A reception will follow and books will be for sale.  

5-6 PM: Book Launch with Hilary Bergen And Emily Doucet

6-7 PM: Reception 

ABOUT DANCE ANIMA:

The practice of dance holds a paradox at its core: we view dance as a uniquely human thing, and yet, training in technique and choreography produces the dancer as a mechanized body whose porousness of boundaries mark the more-than-human condition of our present. Furthermore, because dancing bodies have been instrumental in the development of photography, film, and motion capture tools, dance facilitates an exploration of two interrelated realms: emergent technology and the ontology of the human.

Through a series of interdisciplinary case studies from cinema, animation, robotics, and image-based social media, and using a methodology critically attuned to issues of race and embodiment, Hilary Bergen examines dance’s driving energy, naming it “dance anima.” Bergen argues that this kinetic power—produced collectively by dancers, choreographers, techniques, technologies, and the imagination of the audience—is a valuable (and extractable) resource for engineering life and infusing things with sentience and soul. In so doing, Dance Anima proposes a new history and theory of dance, one that moves beyond the human, arguing for dance as both an apparatus of vitality and an uncontainable energetic force.

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ABOUT INVENTING NADAR:

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Hilary Bergen is currently on faculty in the English department at Dawson College. Her research, which is influenced by her professional dance training, is on the historical intersection between dance and emergent media. She recently held an FRQSC postdoctoral fellowship at the New School in New York City, and she is the organizer of the international Dance and/as Technology conference, held most recently at UQAM in Montréal in 2024. She is a 2022 graduate of Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. 

Emily Doucet is a writer, editor and researcher interested in photography and the cultural life of technology — past, present, and future.  For over 15 years, she has been reading, writing, teaching, and speaking on these topics at academic institutions including the University of Toronto and McGill University, as well as at museums, galleries, and schools across Canada, the US, Europe, and the UK. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Toronto.

📅  September  10, 2026

⏱️ 5-7 PM

📍Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705