This episode was recorded Friday, January 26, 2024

Co-hosts: Dominic O’Key and Sumita Chakraborty

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Kate Rigby (Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction)

This book revives the ancient Christian tradition of meditations on the six days of creation  to reflect upon current concerns around biodiversity loss, climate disruption, ecological unravelling and environmental injustice, and how these wrongs are being redressed by an array of faith-based initiatives around the world.

Kate Rigby is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities research hub at Cologne University in Germany.  Her expertise within the Environmental Humanities lies primarily in environmental literary, historical and religious studies. She is a co-founder of the journal Philosophy Activism Nature, former co-editor of the University of Virginia Press’ Under the Sign of Nature book series, and the author of Topographies of the Sacred (2004), Dancing with Disaster (2015), and Reclaiming Romanticism (2020).  She was also the founding President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture-Australia-New Zealand.

Kory Russel (Designing for the Intimate Shared Reality of All Species)

This work aims to bring awareness to transpecies entanglements and consider some of the species who are implicated in sanitation practices within informal settlements. There are both broader socio-environmental impacts of sanitation practices, and individual lives—human and more-than-human—which are integrally tied to, yet often abstracted from, these processes.

Kory Russell researches non-networked water and sanitation, is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Science at the University of Oregon, and is the current Chair of the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance.  He is a co-founder of the Landscape for Humanity initiative at the University of Oregon. Along with two University of Oregon graduate students (Bjorn Kristensen and Audrey Rycewicz), he has an installation as part of the UO College of Design, Transpecies Design Exhibition in the 2023 Venice Architectural Biennale, which is what he will be discussing in this episode.

Béatrice Szymkowiak (B/RDS)

Use code ASLE35 for a discount of 35% off B/RDS at: https://uofupress.lib.utah.edu/b-rds/. Expires February 29, 2024

B/RDS is a creative poetry project that aims at dismantling Nature narratives that rely on disconnected approaches to the more-than-human world. The collection specifically questions the ecologically damaging discourse of natural history, through a lyrical erasure of Audubon’s iconic “Birds of America.”

Béatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017, and obtained a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2022. She is the author of RED ZONE (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as well as the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. Her work also has appeared in Terrain.org, Portland Review, OmniVerse, Southern Humanities Review, and many others.

Michael Tondre (Oil! by Upton Sinclair)

This is the first comprehensively edited edition of Sinclair’s canonical petro-novel, published by Penguin Random House with a full scholarly apparatus and contextual introduction that illuminates Oil!‘s urgent timeliness in our warming world.

Michael Tondre is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University and author of The Physics of Possibility (Virginia, 2018) and Oil (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Object Lessons series). He is editor of Oil! by Upton Sinclair (which he will talk about in this episode) and has published in journals such as PMLA, ELH, Victorian Studies,Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Dickens Studies Annual, and The Paris Review. His latest book project is titled Refinement: Oil, Literature, and the British Atlantic World, 1850-1930.