Deadline: October 2, 2025
Contact: Abigail Fields, Hall Family Foundation Assistant Professor of French, University of Kansas
Email: abigail.fields@ku.edu
This seminar places renewed critical interest in “the archive” in dialogue with the “non-human turn” in ecocriticism. Work on the non-human and/or posthuman in literary and cultural studies (Haraway 2003; Tsing 2014; Morton 2013 et al.) offers avenues for thinking agency, personhood, and subjecthood alongside other-than-human (and not always living) entities. Archives, which both rely and center upon humans, may seem like an unlikely place to seek out the nonhuman. We suggest, however, that the nonhuman is central to the archive, materially and practically. Scientific archives in particular attest to the importance of evolving systems of land tenure, management and use, and the centrality of fauna and flora to national, imperial, and global histories.
What’s more, if, as Bruno Latour (2014) has argued, a crucial precursor to a “deanimated”, scientific vision of the world-as-object was its animation through cultural ideas with which humans endowed the nonhuman world with meaning, it follows that attention to the process of archiving reveals the vital, cultural, literary roots behind “scientific” conceptions of the nonhuman world. In other words, literary and cultural ideas about nonhuman entities—whether crops, geographical spaces, or animals—regularly underpin and inform “factual” (and therefore more conventionally archival) knowledge.
We welcome contributions that explore how conceptions of the nonhuman in literary and cultural studies—and the critical frameworks that support them—can inform new approaches to the archive by redirecting attention away from the human toward the various “others” that have “made history” if not also, the modern world. On the one hand, we are interested in how theories of the non-human offer new avenues for inquiry and theoretical approaches toward formal archives. How, for example, might an archive be assembled around a non-human subject? Can the nonhuman archive assume alternative/innovative forms (i.e., considering a seed bank or a plot of land as an archive in the same way we may approach a literary archive)? Is the archive itself a site of non-human agency? On the other hand, we are interested in the ways that forms of cultural production including literature, film, and other media might already operate as an archive of the nonhuman. Could the writer or literary comparatist’s ability to gather disparate sources related to a given place, crop, or natural element entail the formation of an archive that itself reveals patterns of non-human agency and subjecthood across different mediums, language literatures, and cultures? We hope to answer these and other questions in a multidisciplinary conversation that welcomes contributions from other field scholars and creative practitioners.
Submissions for this panel are open. Submit here: https://www.acla.org/seminar/b362faf0-32b6-4af6-bf36-fb774b80e84a.
Posted on September 17, 2025
