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 details of her artworks made in response to Leavitt’s legacy; examples of the glass plate photographs of the night sky that Leavitt studied; and 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 twntieth century. This will be followed by a discussion with novelist Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, who contributed a guest essay to the project.

About the Participants
Visual artist and author Anna Von Mertens 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: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (MIT Press, 2024). The book is an expansion of her 2018–2019 exhibition “Measure,” presented at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, which traveled to University Galleries of Illinois State University and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in 2023.

New Hampshire–based writer Rebecca Dinerstein Knight 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). Her screenplay adaptation of The Sunlit Night premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is now a major motion picture.