Deadline: December 1, 2026
Contact: Hannah Schultz
Email: hschultz@haverford.edu

In “The Dawn of Green,” Harriet Ritvo details how nineteenth century British environmentalist movements gave birth to the idea that “the citizenry as a whole—the nation, that is to say—had a vested interest in preserving the traditional appearance of certain rural landscapes” (4). The entanglement of environment and nation has since persisted in British culture: through images of England as a garden, former British colonies as tourist and extractivist Edens, the establishment of national parks and preservation societies such as the National Trust as a form of nation-making, and xenophobic border-patrolling in discourses about native and invasive species. In “Climate Lyricism,” Min Hyoung Song argues that “a consecrated past” is “preserved in the present’s very idea of what is most worth preserving” (37), underscoring the urgency of troubling ideologies of preservation in our current moment of ecological crisis. Explorations of preserving nature too often elide the cultural work it accomplishes—the way, as Song puts it, preservation causes “value [to] adhere to things and bodies, creating hierarchies within and between them” (37).

In this panel, we seek to recover and complicate accounts of nature preserved and its preservationists, accounting for the power structures embedded in and reinforced by British literary and historical narratives, cultural accounts, and personal and political actions. What forms of nature—landscapes, humans, and nonhumans, and their co-constituted environments—are we told are worth preserving? In what ways have environmental preservation and conservation historically and currently been informed by and implicated in discourses of gender, class, race, and sexuality? How are natural spaces preserved by scientific and colonial methods and thereby trained to be productive spaces for empire? Conversely, how has natural preservation shaped and been shaped by narratives of decolonization and postcolonial nation-building?

Please send a 300-word abstract to hschultz@haverford.edu by Dec. 1, 2026.

Posted on September 23, 2026