ecocriticism and environmental studies

Literature of Contagion: The Representation of Epidemics in the Contemporary World

Special Session: SAMLA Conference (November 9-11, 2023 in Atlanta, GA)

In Animal Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Process (1892), Henry Salt argues that “Oppression and cruelty are invariably founded on a lack of imaginative sympathy,” which purports the notion of the “tyrant or tormentor” from ever having a “true sense of kinship with the victim” (16). In a similar way, Donna Haraway states in When Species Meet (2007), that “we are a knot of species coshaping [sic] one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down” (42). Taking cues from Salt and Haraway, our panel will take up key features of human and animal relations and their intersection with the queerness of imaginative sympathy.

Throughout his legendary career, Cormac McCarthy has dealt with existential insecurities at all levels of human experience.  This panel proposes to foster dialogue about this theme in McCarthy’s work.  Abstracts dealing with any of McCarthy's works are welcome for consideration, but we do seek a special focus on McCarthy’s last two published novels: The Passenger and Stella Maris.  Please send a 250-word abstract, a brief bio or CV, and any A/V or scheduling requests to Jay Ingrao (jingrao@utdallas.edu) and Justin Brumit (justin.brumit@tccd.edu) by July 24th.

For presentation at the NeMLA conference in March of 2024:

Critics frequently frame American literary regionalism in geographical terms, whether by emphasizing a region’s spatial boundedness or emphasizing components of regionalist writing that stretch across space and scale. A similar negotiation of spatial scales from the proximate to the planetary has come to characterize recent conversations about climate change in the environmental humanities—for example in the work of Timothy Clark, Benjamin Morgan, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. Regionalism’s engagements with place, scale, ecology, and everyday atmospheres make it a potentially generative form for representing climate, and yet few scholarly treatments have investigated the interconnections between American literary regionalism and climatic thought.

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What a Waste! is an interdisciplinary graduate conference that seeks to explicate the position of waste in the cultural output of the post-war. This conference will be held at the University of St Andrews on 23rd September 2023, and invites proposals from postgraduates and early career researchers.

Toxic Ecologies of the Global South: Panel, NeMLA 2024

Boston, MA, March 7-10, 2024, https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

Shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (less developed countries)? … I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that… I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted. (Lawrence Summers, chief economic advisor to the IMF, 1991).

Matter Really Matters: Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

British and Global Anglophone Panel Session

55th Northeast MLA (NeMLA) Annual Conference

March 7-10, 2024 Boston, Massachusetts

Fungus is everywhere. From the parasitical infection at the core of HBO’s The Last of Us, which has sprung a viral interest in cordyceps and other killer fungi, to Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris and Southern Reach trilogies, and even Michael Sarnoski’s 2021 truffle-centered drama Pig, mushrooms, spores, superbugs populate discourse, real and fictional.

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The climate crisis posits a major threat to the anthropocene regardless of geopolitical boundaries. However, Eurocentric discourses seldom acknowledge the resource exploitation that fuels climate change. This panel seeks to explore works of literature that highlight such instances of resource exploitation in the postcolony vis-à-vis the ideas of security and insecurity in the times of an emergent climate crisis. With a special focus on the specters of neocolonialism that threaten the security of postcolonial ecospheres, this panel seeks to decolonize the discourses of climate change that refuse to address the role played by Western ideology and capital in the rendering insecure of ecologies in the postcolony.  

The “Romance of the Road” had its run in 20th-century literature and culture, and we must now consider what will follow on its heels as it fades into the gloom of an anthropogenically tarnished future.

Car culture has radically renegotiated the individual’s place within human-constructed spaces, and the end of car culture will demand even further revisions to planning codes and architecture. This panel invites participants to discuss a century of car dependency and how literary and cultural discourses can contribute to management of the after-effects, especially in urban environments that have grown steadily clogged with traffic.

Department of Liberal Arts, IIT Bhilai

Presents

South Asian Water Imaginaries in an Era of Environmental Crisis

 A graduate student workshop

 Friday, 13 October 2023

 Concept Note & CFP

Call for Papers

Western Regional Conference on Christianity & Literature 2024

ConVersing/ConServing: Care, Creation, Communion

May 9-11, 2024

Trinity Western University

22500 University Drive

Langley, BC Canada V2Y 1Y1

Our keynote speaker:

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 11.3:

 Trans* Ecologies

Guest editors: Erin L. Durban and Megan Moore

Eva Hayward (2022) inquires, “Can trans mean anything to ecology? If so, what?” The guest editors of this issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly offer Hayward’s question as an invitation to artists, activists, and scholars to consider the possibilities of combining trans* analytics and undisciplined environmental and ecological thinking. The issue follows the Queer & Trans Ecologies Symposium that took place at the University of Minnesota in spring 2023.