"Did Environmental Catastrophe Have a Renaissance?" NextGenPlen
From the Shakespeare Association of America website: “Each SAA meeting features a plenary session of short papers by early-career presenters. NextGenPlen papers are selected via an anonymous screening process, with precedence given to those introducing new topics, displaying fresh thinking about traditional issues, and demonstrating diverse approaches.
Those submitting papers for consideration must be either (1) graduate students at the dissertation stage or (2) scholars who have received the Ph.D. within the past three years. All submitters must be current members of the SAA.”
Plants and People, Together in Precarity I
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Biennial Conference 2021. Link here.
Panel organized by Mary Bowden and Rebecca Olsen. In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to reshape every aspect of American life, garden suppliers reported shortages as people brought plants into their lives and homes. Online house plant accounts shifted from showcasing collections to documenting slow new growth, while beginning and experienced gardeners alike shared images tagged #gardenupdate on social media during lockdown. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as exemplary of broader patterns in human-plant interaction, this panel explores how precarity, at times tied to emergencies like climate change and the pandemic, shapes people’s interactions with plants. We welcome papers that explore how different forms of precarity influence how humans interact with the vegetal world, in both the present and the past, in the United States and around the world, and in literature, art, and popular culture. In what ways have emergencies caused us to re-evaluate the place of plants in our lives? What might we learn, or what have we learned, from diverse traditions’ reliance on plants in precarious situations? And how might we use the lessons and experiences from times of emergency to forge better futures, for us and for the plant world?
Interdisciplinarity: Research, Funding, Publishing
Chaired and organized by John Yargo. This panel will explore the challenges and opportunities of conceptualizing projects that transit across disciplinary borders, as well as acquiring funding for and publishing interdisciplinary work. Speakers: Mona Domosh, Director, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College; Joe Loewenstein, Washington University in St. Louis; and Richard J. Reddick, University of Texas Austin.
New Approaches to Early Modern Environmental Catastrophism
This panel invites early modernist to recalibrate the focus of scholarship on ecological catastrophes from the geopolitical scale to the scale of the individual body. These papers track the complex ramifications that catastrophe had on individual subjects, as a way to take the measure of the literary significance of early modern disaster. Anxieties about the destruction of environment were inextricably linked to ideas of embodied vulnerability and resilience. Please reach out to John Yargo, the panel’s organizer, for more information.
Eco-Entanglements, c. 920-2020: Ruin, Grafting, Stratification
What are the ecological affordances of thinking with the medieval and early modern past? How can the environmental humanities inspire eco-mimetic modes of thinking and writing? Organized by John Yargo and Melissa Hudasko, this think-tank conference invites research-in-progress that parses the entanglements of nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, the material and the metaphysical, to explore how medieval and early modern ecocritical scholarship might speak directly to contemporary political and social concerns.
Beyond Extinction: Species, Metaphor, Language
“To me, it's a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization,” says Werner Herzog, “where tree huggers and whale huggers in their weirdness [?] are acceptable, but no one embraces the last speakers of a language”. How might biology and language illuminate each other as metaphors, and with what implications for the imperative to preserve under the sign of extinction? What optics for the environmental humanities await us at sites of political and ecological catastrophe? In the spirit of the Indian critic G. N Devy, who describes near-extinct languages as “the avant-garde margins of experience” at which knowledge is truly possible, we invite papers that engage with the inseparability of ecology and culture, and that reflect on the imperative to erase, mass-produce, or let live entire life-worlds of experience. By what politics of cuteness, function, or cadence have we held out against the loss of diversity? How might the units we assume in speaking of extinction — the species, the culture — have denied us other, intricate links between bodies and languages?
Ecology, Community, and Affect in Early Modern England
How might ecological metaphors spur our thinking about how it is to feel with other people? What new horizons for social organization might air, animal, and bubbles produce? This panel collects recent scholarship which explores the intellectual potential latent in early modern ecological writing.
Spaces of Authority
The Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will host its sixteenth annual graduate student conference on Saturday, October 13, 2018. Organized by John Yargo, Hayley Cotter, and Maria Ishikawa, this conference invites papers that think the relation between “space” and “authority.” We are delighted to welcome historian Christopher R. Kyle of Syracuse University as our keynote speaker.