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Inaugurated in the spring of 2021, NYU Space Talks is a lecture series convened by Alexander C. T. Geppert at NYU's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and NYU Shanghai with the Department of History in New York City. Each semester, established and upcoming scholars present the latest research on the history and politics of outer space, extraterrestrial life and astroculture, both in Europe and around the globe.
All NYU Space Talks are held on Zoom. Everybody is welcome but advance registration is required.
NYU
SPACE
TALKS
History, Politics, Astroculture
SPRING 2026
About
Schedule
/ SPRING 2026 –– Season XI
Season 8
How to Think Like a Space Billionaire
Valerie A. Olson (University of California, Irvine)
Tuesday, 17 February 2026, 10–11:30 EST
Location: Online
Several of the world’s wealthiest people are aggressively pursuing off-world enterprises. This paper argues that this is not about an obsession with outer space. Instead, outer space serves as an open deregulated space for grand-scale systems thinking and building. To think like a space billionaire, then, is to turn everything into systems: bodies, machines, minds, planetary objects. The talk introduces three key, but not generally understood, elements of systems thought: the system/environment dyad, controlling separations over making connections, and how a built system’s underlying purpose can be hidden. Unless non-engineers – from politicians to populaces – understand these and other basic systems engineering principles, societies will not be able to respond effectively to the emerging threats posed by projects such as generative AI and quantum computing.
Italy’s Participation in Spacelab: A Case of Space Diplomacy?
Piero Messina (Università degli Studi di Padova)
Tuesday, 10 March 2026, 10–11:30 EDT
Location: Online
In the early 1970s, Italy decided to become the second principal contributor – after West Germany – to Europe’s Spacelab within the ESRO framework. That a country with only a decade of experience since the launch of its first satellite, San Marco 1 in 1964, would commit to such an ambitious undertaking is anything but self-evident. This talk reconstructs the decision-making process behind that move along three lines of inquiry: First, who were the key actors pushing Italy onto this new industrial and programmatic terrain? Second, what objectives and expectations informed Italy’s shifting priorities during the post-Apollo period? And third, can this choice be read as a case of ‘space diplomacy,’ in which foreign-policy considerations were at least as important as technological and economic ones?
Eyes in the Sky: Inversion and Imagination from Earth to Satellite and Back
Lilian Kroth (Université de Fribourg)
Tuesday, 14 April 2026, 10–11:30 EDT
Location: Online
Contemporary debates about the epistemic impact of the satellite gaze often emphasise the distant 'photographic witness,' captured in metaphors like 'eyes' or 'mirrors' in the sky. Tracing the philosophical trajectory of satellite imagery reveals enduring efforts to inverse the satellite’s perspective. This talk argues that such inverted vision depends fundamentally on forms of inverted imagination. Building on work in the history and philosophy of science foregrounding the epistemic and imaginative impact of remote sensing, it investigates key philosophical cases in the eighteenth century, in particular Immanuel Kant’s writing on analogies between Earth and Moon. From inverting the imagined perspective from the Moon to concepts such as satellite planetarity, this talk discusses how inverted imagination is key to the epistemic impact of the satellite gaze.
Prelude to the Space Age? Tracing the Cosmic in European Art around 1900
Christina Ntanovasili (Aarhus Universitet)
Tuesday, 12 May 2026, 10–11:30 EDT
Location: Online
This presentation re-examines the historiography of Western modernity and its attendant world concepts of the globe, Gaia, and the planet by tracing a cosmic (re)turn within a European cultural context: the revival of the cosmos as a unifying world rooted in ancient myth and cosmology, yet reimagined in modern art, popular science and spirituality. Based on French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ideas of cosmic forces and the cosmic artisan (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980), I examine how the cosmos reemerges across knowledge domains and analyze, more specifically, themes of stars and cosmogony in the development of visual poetry (Stéphane Mallarmé) and abstract painting (Hilma af Klint). By exploring lesser-known starry worlds in art at the turn of the twentieth century, this cultural history renegotiates the origins of modern astroculture, cosmist worldviews and the Space Age.
EVENT2
CONTCT
/ CONTACT
Professor Alexander C.T. Geppert
New York University
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
USA
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