ecocriticism and environmental studies

ANNE ALOMBERT   FABIENNE BRUGÈRE   RYSZARD KLUSZCZYŃSKI   EDUARDO KAC 

'Care in the Environmental Humanities'

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787)

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 June 2024 

Website: https://www.mdpi.com/si/194481

In the preface to the second edition of Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. refers to his work as a “medicated” novel. He also claims to have written his “medicated” work to provide a meditation on the doctrine of “original sin,” wondering whether the eponymous character is morally responsible for her amoral nature. With a background in the medical field, however, Holmes approaches the concept of morality and amorality from a purely physical point of view, forcing his readers to confront both the fact of the impressionable nature of the human body as well as the potential long-term effects on human psychology of disability induced by bodily trauma.

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Affiliated Panel

Back to No Future: Seeing Behind and Beyond Reproductive (Climate) Futurism

Multispecies South Asia

A wide range of other-than-human subjects—animals, plants, microbes, among others—animate contemporary South Asian lived experiences. Relationships formed across species boundaries— whether brief or long-lasting, utilitarian or altruistic— are imbricated in  the intersectional operations of race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and indigeneity. From quotidian instances of touching, witnessing, and other forms of interacting with other-than-human subjects to exceptional, contextually specific use of them to bolster anthropocentric concerns, the ubiquity of multispecies coexistence is uncontested. 

The D.H. Lawrence Society of North America is pleased to share the CFP for the next Virtual Graduate Conference in D.H. Lawrence Studies. It is scheduled for Saturday, 18 May 2024 and will take place over Zoom. The theme for the event is “Lawrence & Ecology.” Please circulate the poster (attached) and the information below widely. 

Ex-position Feature Topic Call for Papers

Community Dynamics: Urban Spaces, Rural Places, and the In-Between

Guest Editors: Carolyn F. Scott, National Cheng Kung University

Laurent Cases, National Taiwan University

Edward Eugene Nolan, National Taiwan University

Publication Date: December 2025 (Issue No. 54)

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2025

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Graduate Student Conference, “Porosity”

Oct. 25-26th, 2024

Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES)

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Keynote Addresses

Dr. Jinying Li, Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University

Dr. Reginald Jackson, Associate Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature and Performance at the University of Michigan

Call for Papers: Porosity

Special Issue Call for Papers

Planetary Fiction: African Literature and Climate Change

Guest Editors: Nedine Moonsamy (Johannesburg) and David Shackleton (Cardiff)

Deadline for Submissions: 1 February 2025

The Cultural History panel seeks to revivify the political or social intersections that exist between text and context, including interdisciplinary aspects of culture. While papers that explore the continuities between history and film, history and literature, or history as it interweaves with marginalized aesthetic traditions would receive preference, excerpts of longer, ongoing projects that examine how cultural formations are “translated” or subsumed into historical trajectories would be particularly welcome. Submissions that not only practice cultural history by invoking the liminality of borderlands, but also critically reflect upon that practice are also encouraged.

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2025

“Faulkner’s Bodies”

July 20-24, 2025

University of Mississippi

Announcement and Call for Papers

http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner

Steeped in the wide-flung diaspora of the Gothic mode, the Southern Gothic is one of the most prominent ways the South is represented in media and culture. Represented in the works of writers as varied as Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner to Cormac McCarthy, Cherie Priest, and Jesmyn Ward, whether categorized as a form, a style, or a genre, the Southern Gothic is bound up with the specificity of regional cultural anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, history, and geographic identity itself. From its most stereotypical depictions to more nuanced, complex interpretations, the Southern Gothic shapes the wider perception of regional identities in ways that invite our contemporary scholarly engagement.

     “Paper or plastic?” Sustainably sourced or affordably manufactured? Organic or GMO? Every day, consumers are faced with small decisions marketed to make a big impact. ​​Choosing either paper or plastic puts the onus onto the shoulders of the customer rather than acknowledging that regardless of whether or not you leave the store with a paper bag, it’s the planned obsolescence of what’s inside the bag that’s left unaddressed. Opting out of paper billing feels great, until you realize that the WiFi bill’s gone up and an electric bill leaves you contemplating if your LED bulbs are a sustainability placebo. 

To theorize ecology is necessarily to contend with excess, whether that be in the form of unceasing material production or in the forms of social and theoretical remainders. In order to grapple with the excess of agencies at work in the more-than-human world, contemporary theories of ecology often appeal to tropes of darkness, “chthonic ones,” monsters, and ghosts (Morton, 2016; Haraway, 2016; Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt, 2017). By betraying a sense of wonder, these tropes attest to our phenomenological, affective, and discursive bewilderment in the face of what is unknowable and seek to account for that excess by distributing agency beyond the epistemological frameworks of “the human.”