Call for Papers: Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene

One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

29 November 2025 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)

15 min talks

The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its third one-day winter workshop on the topic of “Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene”.

The ongoing environmental crisis is arguably the greatest political and social challenge of our time. Climate change dominates the political, social, cultural and academic discourses, as well as artforms such as film, video games, TV series, and literary fiction. The effect of the climate crisis on literature is illustrated by the many contemporary studies on so called “climate fiction” (sometimes “climate change fiction”) (Trexler 2015; Ghosh 2016; Bracke 2018; Mehnert 2016; Johns-Putra 2019; Andersen 2019). Others have studied how climate change and the Anthropocene challenge the way we think about history, time and narrative (Markley 2019; Chakrabarty 2021; James 2022; Hughes Warrington 2022). Still, the study of historical fiction rarely takes an ecocritical approach or examines representations of climate change or the Anthropocene in the genre. The ambition of this workshop is to open this door and explore what the emergence of the Anthropocene means for historical fiction.

For HFRN’s 2025 Winter Workshop, we welcome presentations that investigate historical narratives of e.g. environmental change, global warming, industrialism and nuclear power, human-animal relationships, urban development, as well as theoretical and methodological queries. The organizers are planning to publish an edited collection on the subject and plan to invite selected contributions from speakers who will present at the workshop. We welcome contributions from researchers at all career stages, as well as practitioners, and particularly from individuals working in the Global South. We accept submissions in English, French and Spanish. Please note that discussions at the workshop will take place in English.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short biographical note via our website (https://historicalfictionsresearch.org/online-workshop-2025-winter/) by 1 October 2025 at midnight. They should consist of a title, an abstract of 250 words max., and a short bio (150 words max).

Organisers: Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Jerome de Groot, Dorothea Flothow, Lisa Grahn, Siobhan O’Connor, and Stephanie Russo. https://brill.com/page/forthcoming_hifi