Green Hour: “The Ghosts of Extinction” (Prof. Dolly Jørgensen)

In the halls of natural history museums all over the world, you peer through the glass and come face-to-face with ghosts. These are real ghosts—presences that haunt us. Behind museum glass, the extinct dead are not just remembered; they live on as other presences.

In this Green Hour talk, I present the thinking behind my forthcoming book Ghosts Behind Glass (University of Chicago Press, 2025), which re-presents extinct animals through the stories told about them and their remains. This re-presenting (by which I mean helping something to be present again through their life history and body) allows the extinct in this book, these ghosts, to speak their own stories.