By Clare Echterling, ASLE/MLA Liaison, University of Kansas
The 2016 MLA convention, held January 7-10 in Austin, Texas, was an exciting and energizing conference for those of us working in environmental literary criticism and the humanities. There were a number of ASLE members in attendance and quite a few excellent and diverse ecocritical panels, including those arranged by the newly inaugurated MLA forum for Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities, whose executive committee includes Sharon O’Dair (University of Alabama), Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (The George Washington University), Stephanie LeMenager (University of Oregon), and Byron Caminero-Santangelo (University of Kansas).
Together with Nicole Seymour (California State-Fullerton), I organized and chaired ASLE’s sponsored panel, “Transgender Studies, Ecology, and the Environmental Humanities.” Michael Mlekoday, from the University of California-Davis, started the session with his talk on labor, arrangement, and contemporary transgender pastoral poetry, “‘With a Hand to Re-arrange Us’: Labor and the Postnatural in Contemporary Transgender Pastoral.” Wan-Chuan Kao, from Washington and Lee University, presented “Transpastoral Ecology, Sustainable Tomboyism,” which focused on the transpastoral, pre-modern tomboyism, and the medieval Arthurian tale The Romance of Silence. Nicole Seymour, who won the 2015 ASLE ecocriticism book award for her monograph Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, completed the panel with her talk “Trans-ing the Environmental Humanities,” wherein she discussed recent convergences between transgender studies and environmental humanities, and provided an outline for what she suggests we call “trans ecologies.”
The Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities forum organized several panels of interest to ASLE members. “The Dirty Coast,” presided by Liane Tanguay of University of Houston, Victoria, featured talks by Alexandra Rahr (University of Toronto), Sharon O’Dair, Christopher Schaberg (Loyola University, New Orleans), and Martha R. Serpas (University of Houston). “Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Fire, and Water” was presided by Stephanie LeMenager, and included Stacy Alaimo, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Lowell Duckert (West Virginia University, Morgantown), Steven Roger Mentz (Saint John’s University, NY), and Serpil Oppermann (Hacettepe University). “Critical Grounds,” which was arranged collaboratively with the Southern United States forum, was chaired by Ted Atkinson of Mississippi State University and included talks by Ruth Salvaggio (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Ethan Mannon (Mars Hill University), and Clare Callahan (Duke University). “Energy, Matter, Force,” a roundtable presided by Stacy Alaimo, included former ASLE presidents Ursula K. Heise (University of California-Los Angeles) and Catriona Sandilands (York University), as well as Ken Hiltner (University of California-Santa Barbara), Steven Roger Mentz, and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (Yale-NUS College).
ASLE and the Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities forum also co-hosted a very well attended happy hour at The Container Bar, a local bar built out of recycled shipping containers. I’m always delighted to meet and reconnect with fellow eco-folk at MLA, and hopefully there will be even more of us in Philadelphia next January. For those interested in participating, the deadline to submit panel proposals to the MLA for the 2017 convention is April 1st.
