In April 2026, Mary Louise Pratt will be at Columbia University as the Wm. Theodore de Bary Distinguished Visiting Fellow, sponsored by the Society of Senior Scholars and organized and hosted by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. Named in honor of the founding director of the Society of Senior Scholars, the de Bary Fellowship supports short-term visits to Columbia by retired faculty in the humanities or humanistic social sciences.

On Monday, April 6, Pratt will deliver a lecture entitled "Planetary Knowledge Making: The Arc of Area Studies, with responses by Timothy Mitchell and Gauri Viswanathan. Click here for full details.

On Monday, April 13, Pratt will speak on a roundtable, “Rethinking Nature Now: Concepts,” with several Columbia faculty members: Vanessa Agard-Jones, Rosalind Morris, Elizabeth Povinelli, Rhiannon Stephens, and Jennifer Wenzel, who will also serve as moderator. Click here for full details.

As part of her visit, Professor Pratt will also host a workshop on April 15 for PhD students formulating dissertation projects.

Pratt is a Silver Professor and Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. A versatile and creative scholar of Latin American literature and popular cultural production, her theorization of the "contact zone" in the early 1990s was among her many contributions to the broader postcolonial turn in literary studies and anthropology. Her most recent work, including her brief essay “Lessons for Losing” and her book Planetary Longings (both 2022), has reckoned with migration, climate change, and other planetary crises.