Ecotheories Colloquium
The Ecotheories Colloquium gathers scholars from across the environmental humanities to ask: what ecotheories become possible if poiesis (or environment-building) rather than representation guides analysis? How do we de-metaphorize and re-materialize terms like ecology and ecosystem within the context of literary studies? And how might ecotheories help construct a decolonial ethics and politics for our contemporary moment? In the past, we have hosted critics including Cary Wolfe, Ada Smailbegović, Kimberly Bain, and Anna Tsing. This year, the Ecotheories Colloquium invites you to focus on the ecological efficacy of forms. We ask: how does form shape and limit human, nonhuman, and interspecies subjectivity? How does form register human industry's intended and unintended consequences?
Upcoming Events
Melody Jue works across the fields of ocean humanities, science fiction, science studies, and media theory. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures…
Jennifer Wenzel is jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. She is an affiliate of the Columbia Climate School.
Her first book,…
Past Events
Early Haitian historian, scientist, and poet Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s massive natural history Voyage dans le nord d’Hayti (1824) proposes that colonialism’s best trick was convincing imperialists and almost everyone else that there is only one nature the world over. His book, including its famous poetic account of the 1791 Bwa…
This talk retells the social and environmental upheavals of the Klondike Gold Rush through stories from two kinds of beavers: the furry 50-pound dam building kind, and Beaver — a critical figure in the origin stories and legal ideas of the Han Hwech'in, the Indigenous people of the Klondike region. It asks how thinking with such sources of…
“Feral Atlas: Toward a Collaborative Environmental Humanities”
Monday, March 27, 2023, 12:00pm-1:30pm in McCosh B14 (Hinds Library)
Register for pre-circulated materials.
Professor Anna Tsing will gather us for a lunchtime conversation on Monday, March 27, from 12:00-1…
Ecotheories Colloquium:
Kimberly Bain, University of British Columbia, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literatures. Kimberly Bain earned a Ph.D. in English and Interdisciplinary Humanistic Study from Princeton University. Bain's most pressing intellectual interests have consolidated around questions of…
Ecotheories Colloquium:
Ada Smailbegović, Brown University, Assistant Professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, non-human forms of materiality, and histories of description. She is a co-founder of The Organism for Poetic Research.
Registration free and…
Ecotheories Colloquium:
“Ecology/Echography: Heidegger's Hut—Three Displacements”
Cary Wolfe, Rice University, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English. He has written on a range of topics, from American poetry to bioethics. He is series editor for Minnesota Press's Posthumanities Series
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