Book Launch and Discussion / “Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt,” with Anna Von Mertens and Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

Date: 11 December 2024, 7–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

Please join us to celebrate the recent publication of Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (MIT Press, 2024) by visual artist and author Anna Von Mertens. This multifaceted project is a recognition and celebration of the woman whose discovery founded modern cosmology and of the power of attention in scientific observation, artistic creation, and the making of meaning. Von Mertens will present a richly illustrated talk that includes historic photos of the unique community of women, now known as the Harvard Computers, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory at the turn of the twentieth century; examples of the glass plate photographs of the night sky that Leavitt studied; and details of the artworks she made in response to Leavitt’s legacy. This will be followed by a discussion with novelist Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, who contributed a guest essay to the project.

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A.

About the Participants
Anna Von Mertens is a visual artist and author who lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She received a 2022 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Public Understanding of Science and Technology book grant in support of Attention Is Discovery, which is an expansion of her 2018–2019 exhibition “Measure,” presented at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In 2023, the exhibition traveled to University Galleries of Illinois State University and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is a writer based in New Hampshire. She is the author of the novels Hex (Viking, 2020) and The Sunlit Night (Bloomsbury, 2015), the bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems Lofoten (Aschehoug, 2012), and the forthcoming nonfiction project Notes to New Mothers (W. W. Norton). A film adaptation of The Sunlit Night, for which she wrote the screenplay, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.