E-mail: pascal.schwaighofer [at] mcgill.ca (Dr. Pascal SCHWAIGHOFER)
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Pascal Schwaighofer has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University (May 2024) and an MA in Fine Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. In 2022-23, he was a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. His work has been awarded the Peter Uwe Hohendahl Graduate Essay Prize in Critical Theory, Cornell University and the Comparative Literature Graduate Students Essay Prize. His artworks have been acquired by private and public collections and exhibited in major European museums. He was awarded several prizes and project grants, such as the Swiss Art Award, Project Grant Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA), Pro Helvetia Research Grant, and the Percent for Art (Kunst und Bau), Amt f眉r Hochbauten Z眉rich, Switzerland, among others.
As a literary scholar and multidisciplinary artist, my research is informed by transdisciplinary attention to environmental humanities, visual studies, and critical theory. My writing and artistic practice mutually inform each other鈥檚 methodology, broadly converging on comparative strategies in scientific literature and visual culture.
My current book project is based on my dissertation titled Domesticating Metaphors鈥擳he Uses of Honeybees in Times of Extinction. Starting from the material culture of apiculture, the thesis explores the modern Western fascination with honeybees and its transdisciplinary influence on literature, linguistics, cybernetics, economy, and ecology. While bee culture occupies the threshold between feral life and domestication, thus interjecting culturally specific concerns about kinship, race, and nationality (Anna Tsing 1995), modern apiculture is confronted with an unprecedented decline of honeybees. I explore how these challenges are imbricated with rhetorical discourse, modern entomology, and the 鈥榖roken world thinking鈥� against high-tech reparative fantasies and apocalyptic scenarios.
In the spring of 2024, during my postdoc fellowship in the programs of Comparative Literary and Culture Studies (CLCS) and Social Justice and Sustainability (SJS) at Franklin University Switzerland, I initiated the project 鈥淎ffective Narratives in the Age of Environmental Degradation.鈥� Started as seminar and colloquium around the emotional, psychological, and conceptual impact of global warming, the project will continue in the form of workshops and an interdisciplinary edited collection. Together with Kate Roy and Caroline Widmer, we have invited contributors to investigate the impacts and challenges of thinking and coping with contradictory narratives about global warming and disrupted ecologies. On the one hand, the prospect of environmental disruptions confronts us with the legacy of previous generations, reluctant politics, and aggressive lobbying of extractive industries. On the other hand, we are called to act responsibly and think creatively as we are nursed with the hope that innovative and sustainable projects will save the planet. Squeezed between reports on past negligence and future threats and losses, the present demands new narratives and storytelling coping with grief and affect.
Among other art projects, I am currently working on Water Bodies, a major public artwork for the city of Zurich, Switzerland, which is expected to be completed in January 2025. Conceived for the building hosting the Department of Construction and Civil Engineering, I designed a multipartite glass sculpture loosely reproducing what could be called an 鈥榚xploded hydrography鈥� of the city. Each molded glass is hung in the light wells of the house, representing a resized fragment of the city鈥檚 water arteries. The length of each piece is determined by the mapped bridges and dams interpreted as cuts of the body of water. The installation will present splintered rivers frozen in glass and scattered in the vertical shaft of the building as a meditation on the historical development of the urban fabric and the symbiotic fantasy of water and city dwellers.
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