By Ted Geier, ASLE/PAMLA Liaison, Rice University

ASLE has established an important presence at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) thanks to the work of my predecessor as ASLE-PAMLA Liaison, Kevin Hutchings, who established the “conference-within-a-conference” that stalwart PAMLA Director Craig Svonkin calls these sessions. Craig is no doubt also responding to the incredible surge in environmental topics across the conference in recent years. I counted no less than 20 other sessions that the average ASLE member might well attend, such as the excellent tradition Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan has founded in Italian ecocritical sessions at PAMLA, not to mention the myriad of papers on many less explicitly ecocritical panels. With other PAMLA Standing Sessions in intersecting fields such as space, food, and  science fiction studies, ASLE members might want to consider participating in the November 2016 PAMLA in Pasadena. Stay tuned for our ASLE-PAMLA CFP, as well.

PAMLA’s 113^th conference was held in downtown Portland, Oregon from November 6^th through 8^th, in the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower and Portland Marriott City Center and featuring breathtaking views of the city, Mt. Hood, and more. Lovely downtown Portland was bustling with the hundreds of conference participants from morning ‘til night, and I was honored to take all the space Craig and conference organizers could spare this year in presiding over three outstanding, very well attended ASLE sessions on topics in Ecocriticism and Animal Studies. Once again, our panel members represented an excellent diversity of career stages, institutional affiliations, independent scholarship, and research topics. These speakers are doing some of the most relevant and groundbreaking current thinking across the field’s vibrant reach.

I organized panels this year according to some general themes. “Eco I” featured different approaches to place from classical studies, engaged local-urban eco-pedagogies (by a Portland-area professor), language and identity in regional literature of the early twentieth century, and a theoretical interrogation of the ‘ecological uncanny’. Eco II delved further into some of the subtle troublings of global ecologies and experience in much recent ecocriticism while working across literature, media studies, waste and oceans, political and military influences on environment and identity, and even geology. This session also raised key questions about gender, species being, and colonial violences. Finally, I dedicated Eco III to Animal Studies, including recent theories of human-animal relations, animality, and biopolitics, and addressing novels, poetry, and film. All of our panelists worked from impressive critical sensibilities, and together represented a strong sense of the history—and present and future—of Ecocriticism.

The sophistication of inquiry in our twelve papers inspired excellent discussion that our panelists deftly developed into remarkable collaborations throughout the Saturday of our sessions. Our sparkling results were realized thanks to agile moderating by my fellow session chairs, Taylor Eggan and Katja Jylkka. Panelists’ nuanced literary analysis, philosophical precision, and searching cultural inquiry from start to finish made a lasting impression on the audience. Beyond the conference, the ASLE-PAMLA live-tweeting tradition started last year in Riverside ‘broadcast’ session ideas around the world for real-time interactions, building ecocritical communities (and supplying some comic relief) regardless of geography. While we could not connect schedules for a redux of the ASLE group outing of last year, folks were in communication throughout PAMLA and its many exciting activities around the conference, and it’s clear that we all can look forward to ongoing great work and ASLE community engagement at PAMLA for years to come.

Panel papers and participant info below. Abstracts can be viewed at http://www.pamla.org/2015/schedule/overview?session_title=Ecocriticism&field_session_number_value=All

Ecocriticism I

“Forest Exiles, Violence and the Other in Indian Epics,” Steve Adisasmito-Smith, California State University, Fresno

“Ecotopia Revisited: The Imagined and Enacted Peril and Promise of Portland,” Hill Taylor, Oregon Health and Science University

“Language and Limits in Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain,” Sharon Kunde, University of California at Irvine

“Weird Anima: D. H. Lawrence and the Ecological Uncanny,” Taylor Eggan, Princeton University

Ecocriticism II

“Ask men what they think of stone”: Geologic Heteroglossia in Blood Meridian,” Austin Schauer, Oregon State University

“Trashing Hawai’i: Ecocriticsm, Bluewashing and the Pacific Trash Vortex,” Eleanor Byrne, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

“Naming and Gendering Disaster in George Stewart’s Storm: Feminized Tropical Storms in a Militarized Pacific Rim,” Danielle Crawford, University of California, Santa Cruz

“‘Curse or Blessing’: Animal’s People and Transcorporeal Magical Realism,” Katja Jylkka, University of California at Davis

Ecocriticism III

“A Broader Sociality: Animals in Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream,” Rebecca Geleyn, University of Calgary, Canada

“Suffer Little Alice: Addressing Animals and Sovereignty in Wonderland,” Samantha Skinazi, University of California , Santa Cruz

“Far Above that Crowd: The Question of The Master’s Animal,” Kyle Sittig, Washington State University

“‘The World Unfastens Itself from the Deep Ocean of the Given’: Subjects in Marianne Moore’s ‘The Fish,’ Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish,’ and Jorie Graham’s ‘Salmon’,” Katelyn Kenderish, Independent Scholar