ASLE Spotlight

ASLE Spotlight 2023-24, EPISODE 3: Extinctions and Extractions

McIntyre Amy

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 ...

ASLE Spotlight 2023-24 Lineup and Registration

McIntyre Amy

We are delighted to announce the themes and participants in our 2023-24 ASLE Spotlight series.

Each of our four ASLE Spotlight episodes will feature moderated conversations with ASLE members who have produced new critical and creative work in the environmental humanities. Episodes follow a theme, and highlight publicly engaged scholarship. They will be recorded for later viewing, and posted to ASLE Spotlight and to our Spotlight Channel on YouTube.

Registration is free but required for the live episodes, and space is limited. Priority will be ...

ASLE Spotlight 2023-24, EPISODE 2: WATERY ECOLOGIES

McIntyre Amy

This episode was recorded Friday, December 1, 2023

Co-hosts: Serpil Oppermann and Gisela Heffes

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Jeremy Chow, The Queerness of Water

This book reconsiders canonical long eighteenth-century narratives through the conjoined lenses of queer studies and the environmental humanities. Moving from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Gothic novels including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jeremy Chow investigates the role that bodies of water play in reading these central texts.

Chow navigates various representations and phases of water to magnify the element’s furtive yet pronounced effects on narrative, theory, ...

ASLE Spotlight 2023-24, Episode 1: Collaboration and Community

McIntyre Amy

This episode was recorded Friday, November 3, 2023

Co-Hosts: Petra Kuppers and George Handley

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Mildred K. Barya, The Animals of My Earth School

“In the compassionate, playful, fable-like poems of The Animals of My Earth School, Mildred Kiconco Barya awakens us to the vividly singing, fully alive, non-human communities surrounding us. These poems demonstrate poetry’s unique ability to prick us from our self-involved numbness and awaken us to wonder. There is great solace, tenderness, and innocence here—the kind of innocence capable of apprehending the creatures ...

Call for Submissions: ASLE Spotlight 2023

McIntyre Amy

ASLE Spotlight is as program that features the range of wonderful work our members continue to produce in the environmental humanities. The series will be offered both in live video format with audience, and in a recorded format for viewing and listening afterward, occurring monthly this fall. We presently anticipate three or four Spotlight episodes.

As in past years, each event will:

feature moderated conversations with authors/creators of work chosen for thematic coherence across diverse media such as books, films, web projects, exhibits, etc.; include both ...

ASLE Spotlight 2022, Episode 4: Nature and Memory

McIntyre Amy

This episode was recorded Friday, June 10, 2022

Co-Hosts: Suzanne Roberts and Ryan Hediger

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Kazim Ali, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water

Kazim Ali’s memoir of growing up on unceded First Nations land in Northern Manitoba reflects on responsibility, memory, immigration, and environmental justice. The child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate ...

ASLE Spotlight 2022, Episode 3: Beyond Human

McIntyre Amy

 

This episode was recorded Friday, May 20, 2022

Co-Hosts: Gisela Heffes and George Handley

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Listen, we all bleed.

In the literary essay collection Listen, we all bleed, radical artists from around the world use recordings of nonhuman voices to plead for an end to violence against nonhuman animals. The essays, novelistic and acutely personal, listen to fishes, whales, coyotes, elephants, chickens, and more. Central to this work is the importance of listening—just listening—as a creative effort that’s also an activist act. An EcoLit ...

ASLE Spotlight 2022, Episode 2: Entangled Geographies

McIntyre Amy

This episode was recorded Friday, April 22, 2022

Co-Hosts: Matt Henry and Jennifer Ladino

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion examines the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world and considers how literature from the 1830s to the 1930s reckoned with a new vision of extraction-based life. The threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form as part of the discursive and imaginative process ...

ASLE Spotlight 2022, Episode 1: Public Engagement and Performance

McIntyre Amy

This episode was recorded Friday, March 18, 2022

Co-Hosts: Brandon Galm and Joshua Calhoun

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonder in a World Beyond Humans  (Use code ASLE25 valid now through 4/15/22 for a 25% discount)

Looking to honor life on earth, Janisse Ray has repeatedly immersed herself in wildness. From overwintering with butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, her stories capture the joys of heart-pounding amazement, reflect on the sights of explorers like Bartram and Sacagawea, and document experiences rare in an ...

ASLE Spotlight 2021, Episode 4: Identity and Place

McIntyre Amy

This episode was recorded Friday, June 11, 2021. Guest Charles Pigott gratefully acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship) and the Isaac Newton Trust.

 

Co-Hosts: Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Gisela Heffes

Featured Guests/Works:

Scott Edward Anderson, Azorean Suite: A Poem of the Moment/Suite Açoriana: Um Poema do Momento

“One can be born on an island in two ways,” wrote the poet and novelist Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto. “From the body of a woman or from the radiance of sensibility.” In this bilingual, book-length poem, Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana, ...