Calls for Papers

In 2011, Rob Nixon proposed that one of the central challenges for addressing human-driven climate change was representational: how to make visible the ecological degradation that occurs gradually and out of sight within communities on the receiving end of global inequality. This symposium revisits Nixon’s provocation 15 years later from the specific vantage point of African environments and cultures. While the African continent makes amongst the least contributions to global emissions, it bears the brunt of climate impacts, from soil erosion, drought, and ...

How does poetry write Earth, and how might such writing unsettle territory? This panel/seminar brings geopoetics into conversation with ecopoetry and the materiality of writing to explore how language, bodies, and earthly processes participate in the making—and unmaking—of place.

Paul Celan’s poetics offers one point of departure. His notes toward The Meridian associate poetic language with lapidary inscription and the displaced, resistant presence of an “erratic language-block.” Read through this lens, stone, soil, ash, and fossilized traces bear upon poetic form, shaping its fractures, ...

In his searing book on the Gaza genocide, Ungrounding: the Architecture of Genocide, Eyal Weizman expands his central concept of ungrounding in the following manner: “Ungrounding…aims to remove a society from its place and erase all traces to its previous existence. It extends from buildings down to the soil beneath them. It is a type of violence that is earth-shaping, terra-forming. Ungrounding is not a by-product of military confrontation but rather its aim. It destroys all conditions that sustain life and produces an ...

While Emily Dickinson’s writings show her deep connection to her rural Massachusetts landscape, or terroir, she also knew the terrors of her place and time: illness; deaths of friends and family; political violence, including the Civil War; anti-immigrant sentiment; climate catastrophe and species die-offs; and increasingly centralized wealth and power.

In an 1870 manuscript (Fr 1174a), Dickinson wrote, “Contained in this short Life / Were wonderful extents,” including five variant words for “wonderful”: magical, terrible, miraculous, exquisite, and tenderest. Dickinson, of course, often included ...

Boston March 24-27, 2027 Subject Area: Disasters and Apocalyptic Culture Submission Deadline: Oct 31, 2026 Scope of the paper topics accepted under this area: Disasters and Apocalyptic Culture offers a forum for these questions and critical approaches surrounding the culture of disasters, catastrophes, accidents, and apocalypses in global art, literature, media, film, and popular culture. Disasters and Apocalyptic Culture addresses broader disciplinary topics and innovative intersections of humanities, musicology, social science, literature, film, visual art, psychology, game studies, material culture, media studies, ecology, and information technology. Interested individuals are ...

The multidisciplinary field of Extinction Studies attends to historical losses as well as those that are in progress and projected. With more than a million animal and plant species currently at risk and many other ways of being under existential threat, there is no end to the work of scholars, artists, and activists who address extinction in their work.

Guided by the conference theme “Territory: Terra, Terroir, and Terror,” this session seeks perspectives from the arts, humanities, and social sciences on the relationship between ...

Sixty years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which shed light on species decline as a result of pesticides like DDT, noticing silences in nature and employing the rhetoric of silence in environmental literature continue. However, there is a simultaneous effort by writers to rethink and reimagine the audibility of “silent” beings like plants, worms, and glaciers. While sound is not often thought of as a feature of literary media, close-reading for sound shows literature’s capacity to imagine sound, silence, and ...

Environmental humanists and literary scholars have many genres for theorizing environmental fear, injustice, despair, or pessimism. Environmental gothic, noir, picaresque, horror, and crime fiction are all genres theoretically defined by and committed to engaging with exploitation and terror in historically and formally specific ways. And the hermeneutic of suspicion, devoted to diagnosing and revealing obscured forces and causes, is especially attuned to those that produce systemic violence. We know how to read for necropolitics, colonialism and neocolonialism, anti-Blackness, objectification, and misogyny.

What, conversely, are ...

Animal Studies Across Disciplines Symposium April 7th-April 9th 2027 Arizona State University

Many scholars argue that we are now living in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—a name chosen to encapsulate an irreversibly transformed planet due to the rapid expansion of human populations, increasing exploitation of animals and natural resources, and pervasive pollution. The effects of the Anthropocene have been caused by only a small percentage of the world’s population, yet those living in the Global South disproportionately suffer the consequences. The Anthropocene, then, is just as ...

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 ...