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Past Events - Environmental Humanities Research Workshop

2022-2023 Events

 
400px-anusha-work-in-progress_may26final.pngChandana Anusha (Postdoctoral Fellow in Environment, Race, and Ethnicity, Kaplan Humanities Institute)
May 26, 2023
3:00 pm
Kresge Hall 2335
 

 

 

 
Ekin Kurtic (Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, Middle East and North African Studies Program)Work-in-progress session 
May 18, 2023
2:00 pm
Kresge Hall 2335

 

400px-blue-humanities-poster-legal.jpgNew Directions in the Blue Humanities
May 17, 2023
2:00 - 5:00 pm
University Hall 201 (Hagstrum Room)

 

 

 

 

James Schwoch (MTS) — Teaching Environment and Climate at Northwestern
May 9, 2023
3:00 pm
Kresge Hall 2435

 

400px-jesmyn-wards-eco-gothic-visiting-lecture-by-teresa-goddu-2.pngJesmyn Ward's Eco-Gothic: A Visiting Lecture by Professor Teresa Goddu
May 8, 2023
5:15 pm
Kresge Hall 1515 (Trienens Forum)

Co-presented by the American Cultures Colloquium, American Studies, Science in Human Culture Doctoral Colloquium, and the Environmental Humanities Research Workshop.

Teresa Goddu (Vanderbilt University) will give a talk on Jesmyn Ward's gothic ecology in Ward's recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. An informal Q&A session for graduate students with Professor Goddu will take place at 4:30 pm, prior to the start of her talk. This will focus more on Goddu's work in developing the sustainability studies minor at her university, environmental humanities pedagogy, and her experience working in an increasingly interdisciplinary subject matter.

 

Clare Ostroski — Animal Studies and Posthumanism: Problems and Ideas for Bridging Disciplines in the Environmental Humanities
April 17, 2023
3:00 pm
Kresge Hall #2331

Clare Ostroski (Screen Cultures) will explore alternative ways to think about technology and environment together, focusing on the intersections of animal studies, nonhumanness, posthumanism, and cyborgs (complete description below).

As seen in our entanglements with microplastics and nuclear toxicity, human and nonhuman matter necessarily and continually collide with one another. My dissertation explores how media history and theory might help us imagine more radical futurities in those conditions. Using feminist, Black, and queer materialisms, environmental anthropology, and Indigenous cosmologies, I look at dead animals in cinema, taxidermied and plastinated bodies in museums, animatronic robots in theme parks, and all kinds of organisms changed, or in Donna Haraway’s words, “fractured,” by radioactivity. 

In this talk, I hope to discuss some disciplinary challenges and solutions I have encountered. Some questions I hope to work through with the Environmental Humanities Research Workshop are:

Phoenix Gonzalez — Ecological Disaster and Ecofeminism in Three Medieval Noah Plays
April 13, 2023
12:00 pm
Via Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/99334258361

Work in progress session with Phoenix Gonzalez (Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama). The biblical story of Noah’s Flood was well known in late medieval English iconography, appearing frequently in striking stained glass windows and elaborate, emotional manuscript illuminations. It was also one of the few Old Testament stories to be found in three extant late medieval English Cycle Plays—Chester, York, and Towneley. Performed—or intended to be performed—on the occasion of Corpus Christi in civic productions, the late medieval Noah plays in these three Cycles dramatized the events of the biblical Flood story and added medieval details, most notably the trenchant, truculent character of Uxor Noe and her female companions, or Gossips. Instead of following God’s command to board the ark with her husband, like the animals do in two-by-two formation, Uxor argues that her place is on land with her Good Gossips, whom she is willing to follow to her death. Layered on top of the recusant choice to disobey God’s command is Uxor and her Gossips’ willingness to defy social norms, exemplified especially in the defiant drinking song they sing towards the end of the Chester play. In their resistance and refusal, Uxor and her Gossips stand together as an antagonistic force for change in the midst of rising floodwaters around them.

The importance of this story in the medieval biblical narrative and its cosmic proportions suggest several questions: What sort of ecological framework did the Noah pageants put forth for their medieval audiences? What image of nature would an audience have walked away with? And how did the plays conceive of a woman’s role in the midst of this ecological disaster? Through a comparative, ecofeminist look at Uxor and her Gossips across these three plays, this essay argues that the plays enacted a redefinition of human relationships, thereby reinterpreting what it could mean to interact with the wildness of God and nature, as represented by the Flood.

 

kat-caribeaux-and-alex-knapp-_the-foreseeable-future-400px.jpgThe Foreseeable Future: Emerging Aesthetic Methods for the Environmental Humanities
Kat Caribeaux (PhD, Art History) and Alex Knapp (PhD, IPTD)
January 23, 2023
3:00 - 4:00 pm
University Library, Room 4770

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

wvcoal_euze-400px.jpgWest Virginia v. EPA and Beyond:
Environmental Regulation in the 21st Century United States
October 24, 2022
4:00 pm
McCormick Foundation Center #3127
(1870 Campus Drive)

A panel discussion featuring:

This past summer the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, which some legal observers called "one of the most significant environmental rulings the court has ever reached." If you've followed the story you might still be wondering what the EPA can and can't do, what the implications are for U.S. climate policy, and what terms like "major questions doctrine" and "Chevron deference" actually mean. Please join us on October 24th at 4:00 pm in 3127 McCormick Foundation Center for answers to all these questions and more! Our distinguished panel of legal experts will explain the ruling and its likely consequences for our current political moment and for many years to come.

 

victor-seow_the-world-that-carbon-made_10_17_22-400-px.jpgVictor Seow — The World That Carbon Made
October 17, 2022
4:30 pm
University Hall #201

Co-presented by the Science in Human Culture Klopsteg Lecture Series.

In this talk, historian of science and technology Victor Seow will be introducing his new book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, which uses the history of East Asia’s onetime largest coal mine—the Fushun colliery—to examine the rise of fossil-fueled developmentalism in the region and, more broadly, the interplay between energy and power in the industrial modern age.

 

 


 

2020-2021 Events

The Environmental Humanities Podcast 

Hosted by Zeynep Oguz, the Environmental Humanities Podcast Series streams on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/environmentalhumanities.

Fall 2020

zee_jerry-260x260.jpgSeptember 27, 2020 (publication date)
Environmental Humanities Podcast Episode #1
Sand, dust, and sandstorms in China - Jerry Zee

Featuring:

Jerry Zee, Princeton Environmental Institute and the Princeton University Department of Anthropology

Corey Byrnes, Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern

Zeynep Oguz (Host), Kaplan Humanities Institute and Department of Anthropology, Northwestern

On Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/environmentalhumanities/jerry-zee-on-sand-dust-and-sandstorms-in-china

min-hyoung-song-260x260.jpgOctober 27, 2020
4:00 - 5:00 pm
via Zoom
Climate Lyricism
Min Hyoung Song, English and Asian American Studies, Boston College

Do you get overwhelmed thinking about climate change? One reason might be because you feel powerless to do anything about it. Certainly, a focus on feeling powerless is very much a part of recent environmental humanities discussions about distributed agency and human- nonhuman entanglements. This talk seeks to connect such discussions with the feeling of powerlessness, and offer some thoughts about how contemporary literature can help you to engage in a practice of sustained attention to climate change.

Co-presented by the Comparative Literary Studies Program.

ashley-dawson-260x260.jpgNovember 10, 2020 (publication date)
Environmental Humanities Podcast Episode #2
Reclaiming the energy commons - Ashley Dawson

Featuring:
Ashley Dawson, Author, Activist, and Professor of English at the Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, CUNY

Zeynep Oguz (Host), Kaplan Humanities Institute and Department of Anthropology, Northwestern

 On Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/environmentalhumanities/ashley-dawson

Winter 2021

chrysanthemum-fields-event-260x260.png

February 16, 2021
3:30 - 4:30 pm CST
via Zoom - Click here to register
Chrysanthemum Fields Forever: Folk Rock Form and Environmental Sound in Taiwan
Andrew F. Jones, East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley

The Taiwanese folk-rock music of Lin Sheng-xiang and Chung Yung-feng emerged from the social movements of post-martial law Taiwan, and in particular from local environmental struggles against the effort of the developmental KMT party-state to construct a dam in their hometown. Lin and Chung’s early work with the Labor Exchange Band self-consciously advocated a return to rural roots, local idioms, and to the land. This talk focuses in particular on Lin and Chung’s appropriation of the long-playing record (LP) as a musical, narrative, material, and social form and as a means of organizing, historicizing, and giving voice to local subjectivities, political struggles, and environmental sounds. In their studio-craft and recording practices, Lin and Chung have constructed a radically open and participatory model of folk musical expression, predicated on the auto-ethnographic construction of a rural soundscape.

Co-presented by the Environmental Humanities Workshop and the Program in Comparative Literary Studies.

tulips,-skies,-black-holes-260x260.pngFebruary 19, 2021
12:00 - 1:20 pm CST
via Zoom - Click here to register
Tulips, Skies, Black Holes, and Other Challenges to Picturing Weather and Climate
John Durham Peters, English and Film & Media Studies, Yale University

Professor Peters is the author of several books, including Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel (all published by the University of Chicago Press). He is working on a media history of weather.

Pre-talk Coffee with Grad Students

Professor Peters is also holding a pre-talk “coffee” for graduate students on Friday, February 19 from 10:30-11:30 am CST. Click here to register.

Presented by the Center for Global Culture and Communication.


2019-2020 Events

Fall 2019

inscribed stones on grassy land surrounding lake with mountains in the backgroundOctober 8, 2019
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Kresge Hall #2350 (Kaplan Institute)
Topology and the Topos: Situated Poetics in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta
Jayme Collins, PhD student in English and Franke Graduate Fellow of the Kaplan Humanities Institute

Brown bag workshop (bring your own lunch!)
More details: Click title link above.

RSVP for pre-circulated materials to Adam Syvertsen: adamsyvertsen2025@u.northwestern.edu

Winter 2020

January 21, 2020
4:00 - 5:30pm
Kresge Hall #2380
The Brazilian Backlands Reconstructed: Environmental Mimesis in João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Victoria Saramago, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago

Few Brazilian novels have been as influential as João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas (1956; trans. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963). In many senses, Grande sertão: veredas epitomizes a long tradition of intellectual and literary reflection on the country’s backlands, reconfigured in this novel via Modernism and existentialism, but remaining deeply grounded in the specificities of local environments and ways of life. This talk investigates some fundamental ways in which this novel has functioned as a social and environmental agent by inspiring a number of conservationist projects in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais and setting symbolic standards for what referential reality should be. Drawing on theories of fiction and artistic agency, this talk seeks to explore key aspects of the convergence between fiction and environmental conservation. It does so by analyzing projects that explicitly attempt to recreate and evoke the novel’s settings in the Brazilian backlands: the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park, the Guimarães Rosa Touristic Circuit, and the Manuelzão Project.

More details: Click title link above.

February 11, 2020
4:00 - 5:30pm
Kresge Hall #2350 (Kaplan Institute)
Toxic Matter in Translation: Chinese Waste Politics and the Challenge to Recycling
Adam Liebman, Mount Vernon Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar, George Washington University

In 2018 China banned imports of “foreign garbage,” profoundly disrupting recycling programs around the world and sending a message that what westerners consider a virtuous environmental practice often merely displaces pollution. Chinese waste politics further challenges notions of recycling by drawing attention to the environmental injustice implications of what I call “toxic matter in translation”—harmful substances cycling through biosocial processes that are unevenly distributed, recognized, and contested across political and epistemological boundaries. This talk illustrates the process of constructing and contesting material/linguistic equivalents with three ethnographic vignettes from a southwestern Chinese city. The first documents contestations over toxic “swill pigs” that depart from celebrations of the role of pigs in recycling soil nutrients during the Mao era; the second centers on the struggles of rural migrant scrap traders considered polluting by the state; and the third highlights how one entrepreneur’s efforts to build western-style recycling systems have been undermined by the anti-foreign waste movement.  

More details: Click title link above.

Spring 2020

CANCELLED May 22, 2020
8:30 am - 7:00pm
Location TBD
We are sorry, but this event has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We wish everyone good health and community strength.
Symposium on Oceans and the Blue Humanities

The Environmental Humanities Research Workshop and doctoral candidate Bonnie Etherington (English/Northwestern) will host a day-long symposium on oceans and the blue humanities on May 22, 2020. The schedule is still in the works but an exceptional lineup of confirmed speakers to date includes:

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, English, UCLA
Vicente Diaz, American Indian Studies, Minnesota
Elizabeth Hennessey, History, Wisconsin
Sarah Dimick, Environmental Studies/English, Lafayette
Harris Feinsod, English, Northwestern

 


2018-2019 Events

Spring 2019

ashland-belle-helene-plantation-1998-richard-misrach-240px.jpgApril 8, 2019
Sara Černe
Mississippi Palimpsests and Industrial Wastelands

Workshop: 12:00 - 1:30pm; Kresge Hall #2350 (Kaplan Institute)
Details: Click title link above

Sara Černe is a PhD student in English at Northwestern, and a Franke Graduate Fellow of the Kaplan Humanities Institute.

 

waste-poster-240px.jpgApril 11, 2019
Waste Matters Symposium

Featuring Gabrielle Hecht (Stanford), Benjamin Morgan (UChicago), Zachary Samalin (UChicago), and Amy Zhang (NYU).

Click here for full symposium details.

 

 

 

 

species-pieces-diademed-sifaka-240px.pngApril 17, 2019
Heather Houser
A New Natural History through Data Visualization

Public talk: 5:00 - 6:30pm; University Hall #201
Details: Click title link above

Brownbag lunch discussion with Professor Houser for graduate students:
12:30 to 1:30pm; Kresge #2350—Bring your own lunch!
Please RSVP to Sarah Dimick at sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu

Heather Houser is Associate Professor of English and co-director of Planet Texas 2050 at The University of Texas at Austin

bahng-gentrification-global-racial-capitalism-240px.jpg
April 29, 2019
Aimee Bahng
Gentrification of the Sea: Artificial Islands, Climate Change, and Transpacific Speculations

How global racial capitalism continues to extract profit from scenes of environmental degradation

Public talk: 12:30 - 1:50pm; Crowe Hall #1132
Details: Click title link above

Aimee Bahng is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Pomona College

 

Winter 2019

eco-books-poster-240px.jpgJanuary 16, 2019
Corey Byrnes and Keith Woodhouse
Eco Books: A Discussion on Writing and Publishing in the Environmental Humanities

Public Talk: 4:00 - 6:00 pm; Kresge Hall #1515 (Trienens Forum)
Details: Click title link above

Corey Byrnes and Keith Woodhouse, Northwestern University

 

take-shelter-poster-240px.jpgFebruary 6, 2019
"Take Shelter" Film Screening and Discussion

5:15pm; Kresge Hall #2350 (Kaplan Institute)
Details: Click title link above

Pizza will be served!

RSVP to Adam Syvertsen (adamsyvertsen2025@u.northwestern.edu)

Pre-screening reading (optional): "'There's a Storm Coming!': Reading the Threat of Climate Change in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter" by Agnes Woolley.

 

Fall 2018

francois-northwestern-talk-poster-oct-11-2018-168x210.jpgOctober 11, 2018
Anne-Lise François
"In the Cowslips Peeps I Lye:" Romantic Botany and Telling the Time of Day by the Light of the Anthropocene

Public Talk: 5:00 - 6:30pm; University Hall #201 (Hagstrum Room)
Details: Click title link above

Anne-Lise François, Department of English, UC Berkeley 


2017-2018 Events

ecomedia-hester-blum-poster-240px.jpgNovember 13, 2017—The Ecomedia of Polar Exploration

Hester Blum, Department of English, Penn State University

 

 

January 19, 2018—The ‘Human' in History and Biology: Questions of Scale, Questions of Value

Julia Adeney Thomas, Department of History, University of Notre Dame

January 29, 2018—Bringing Ecocritical Methods to Sound Media

Jacob Smith, Department of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern

 

February 12, 2018—Space of the Gigantic: Extraction and Urbanization in Inner Mongolia

Max Woodworth, Department of Geography and East Asian Studies, Ohio State University

March 5, 2018—Masculinities, Rollin' Coal, and Pollution Porn: Mediating Ecopiety and Its Discontents

Sarah McFarland Taylor, Department of Religious Studies, Northwestern

jeff-vandermeer-talk-poster-240px.jpgApril 27, 2018—Area X: Environmental Storytelling in the Age of Trump and the Anthropocene

Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and the Southern Reach Trilogy

 

May 7, 2018—Nature As An Artist in Early Modern Europe

Rebecca Zorach, Department of Art History, Northwestern

mccammack-skokie-lagoon-poster-240px.jpgMay 23, 2018—Landscape of Hope? The Skokie Lagoons and Black Environmental Labor

Brian McCammack, Department of Environmental Studies, Lake Forest College

 


2016-2017 Events

 environmental-humanities-fall-2016-flyer-240px.jpgFall 2016 Events Overview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 7, 2016—A "Queer-Looking Compound": Race, Abjection, and the Politics of Hawai‘ian Poi

Hi‘ilei Hobart, Postdoctoral Fellow in Indigenous and Native American Studies, Northwestern

the-sun-is-not-so-central-cherney-poster-240px.jpgOctober 24, 2016—The Sun Is Not So Central

Michael Cherney, Photographer, Calligrapher and Book Artist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 28, 2016—Ontologies of Water: Looking for El Nino on Peru's North Coast

Mary Weismantel, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern

November 11, 2016—Cultivating Subjects in the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Melissa Rosenzweig, Departments of Anthropology and Classics, Miami University (Ohio)

jennifer-johnson_env-humanities-poster-240px.jpgJanuary 20, 2017—Same As It Ever Was: Enkejje, Haplochromis, or Just Trash

Jennifer Johnson, Department of Anthropology, Purdue University

 

 

 

 

 

env-hum-spring-2017-events-poster-240px.jpgSpring 2017 Events Overview

 

 

 

 

 

 

jonsson-eh-seminar-flyer-240px.pngApril 14, 2017—The Holocene Norm: From Victorian Geology to Earth System Science

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Department of History, University of Chicago

 

 

 

 

jamie-jones-4-28-17-env-hum-workshop-240px.jpgApril 28, 2017—Fish Out of Water: The 'Prince of Whales' Sideshow and the Environmental Humanities

Jamie Jones, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

 

 

zorach-ecologies-agents-terrains-240px.jpgMay 19, 2017—Ecologies, Agents, Terrains

Rebecca Zorach, Department of Art History, Northwestern

 

 

May 31, 2017—Life With and Without Society: Some Thoughts on Contemporary Nigeria

Michael Watts, Department of Geography, University of California-Berkeley

 


2015-2016 Events

environmental-humanities-jamieson-240px.jpgJanuary 21, 2016—Living With Climate Change: Will Paris Make a Difference?

Dale Jamieson, Environmental Studies, Philosophy, Law, and Bioethics, New York University

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

shukin-env-hum-240px.jpgApril 7, 2016—Animal Capital After Fukushima

Nicole Shukin, Department of English, University of Victoria

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 20, 2016—History of Entomology (Paper Workshop)

Sheila Wille, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities, Northwestern

ursula-heise-env-hum-240px.jpgMay 5, 2016—The Silent Music of Extinction

Ursula Heise, Department of English and the Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, UCLA