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 open to PU faculty, staff, and students For updates, please visit: english.princeton.edu/events/colloquia/

This year’s Contemporary Poetry Colloquium focuses on ecotheories and ecopoetics—the work of scholars for whom ecology becomes a foundation for theories of literature, and for whom literature becomes a foundation for theories of ecology. Some ecocritics have approached the question of literature and the environment using a representational framework, asking: what more-than-human forms or ecological relationships do writers represent in language? In this colloquium we want to ask a different set of questions: What ecotheories become possible if poiesis (or environment-building) rather than representation guides analysis? What material, ethical, and aesthetic possibilities open up if we consider art not as a mirror but as a site of interaction for human and non-human actors? What are the processes, kinetics, and performances of ecological thinking? How do we de-metaphorize and re-materialize terms like ecology and ecosystem? What possibilities does such a recasting open up for literary form and literary theory? Finally, how might ecotheories help construct a decolonial ethics and politics for our contemporary moment? 

A speaker series co-sponsored by: The English Department’s Contemporary Poetry Colloquium The High Meadows Environmental Institute The Environmental Media Lab The Bain-Swiggett Poetry Fund The Effron Center for the Study of America The Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities The University Center for Human Values