2022-2023
Theme: Botanical Media Culture
Click here for L&E Fall 2022 Calendar!
- Please join us on Monday, October 10th from 11:30 – 1:30 pm at the Cheadle Center for Biological and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) for a tour of the center’s natural collections including a herbaria tour led by Professor Greg Wahlert.
- We also invite you to attend our Fall reading group on November 14th, 12:00 – 2:00 pm at SH2623 to share thoughts on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss and Mary Siisip Geniusz’s Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask.
2021-2022
Theme: Toxic Seas
Click here for L&E Fall 2021 Calendar!
Oct 22, 2021 — We kick off the new academic year in collaboration with the ACGCC Center by hosting a roundtable discussion with the three new faculty members of the department: Amrah Salomón, Cathy Thomas, and Heidi Amin-Hong.
Click here for this quarter’s L&E Calendar!
2020-2021
Theme: “Beyond the Index”– Living with Fire
L&E Sponsored Events:
Lit and Environment is proud to host SFRA President and famed environmental science fiction scholar Gerry Canavan (Marquette University) as he presents his current research on the cultural and political impacts of contemporary works by Kim Stanley Robinson
May 25th, 2021 — We continue our Graduate Student “Works in Progress” series, with presentations from Maite Urcaregui and Leah Norris
May 20th, 2021 — Our final, Spring Quarter meeting of the Undergraduate Book Club. For our final meeting, we held a “watch party” with two short films that trace hopeful speculative futures arising from our current moment of crisis, in addition to discussing Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety
February 17th, 2021–We continue our quarterly grad student “Works in Progress” series, with a special focus on the 2017 Thomas Fire. This event featured Sage Gerson and Mariano Nava Botello
Thursday, Feb 4th, 4-5pm (PST)–Lit and Environment is proud to host Prof. Danielle Celermajer, philosopher and multispecies justice activist, as she reads excerpts from her new work Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future:
Friday, Jan 29th, 2021–our Winter quarter meeting of the yearlong Undergraduate Reading Club series. This year, we are focusing on Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety:
On Friday, Nov 20th, 2020–our quarterly grad student “Works in Progress” series, our first of the academic year. This event featured Maile Aihua Young and R Baker
Thursday, Nov 12th, 2-3pm. Dr. Samantha Joye–an oceanographer famous for her work on deep-sea brine pools and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill–shares her experience of working with the BBC and being chief science advisor for the development of the award-winning ocean conservation video game, Beyond Blue:
Friday, October 30th, 3-4 pm. L & E undergraduate book club kickoff! This is the first of three meetings we will have throughout the year. This year, we will be reading Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (2020):
Thursday, October 22nd, 2-3:15 pm. L&E presents seaweed artist Josie Iselin on her latest work, The Curious World of Seaweed
2018-2019
L&E Sponsored Events:
Tuesday, February 26th, 3pm. L&E presents “Slow Counter-Violence: Why Literature Matters in an Era of Climate Crisis,” a talk by University of Oregon Moore Endowed Professor Stephanie LeMenager. Reception to follow.
L&E Co-Sponsored Events:
Friday-Sunday, March 1st-3rd. UCSB AIIC 2019 SYMPOSIUM: Decolonizing our Lives.
https://sites.google.com/prod/view/decolonizingourlives
Saturday, December 1st, 12pm-3pm. Roundtable with Chickasaw author and poet Linda Hogan.
Friday, November 16th, 9am-5pm. Queer and Trans Graduate Student Union’s first grad student conference, “Envisioning LGBTQIA+ Well Being.”
2017-2018
Theme: Environmental Justice
L&E events:
Friday October 6th, 1-2.30pm. Welcome event & Research Snapshot Presentations.
Friday October 20th, 1pm. Nicole Seymour (Cal State Fullerton).
Nicole Seymour’s first book, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy and the Queer Ecological Imagination, won the 2015 scholarly book award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Her forthcoming book, Bad Environmentalism: Affect and Dissent in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press), recuperates irreverent and anti-sentimental expressions of environmentalism.
Wednesday November 15th, 2pm. International Scholars Event.
Join us as we welcome two Swedish scholars–Fredrik Svensson (Karlstad University) & Daniel Helsing (Lund University)–whose work speaks to the ways in which ecocriticism and the environmental humanities are being conducted in Scandinavia.
Friday February 9th, 1pm. Neel Ahuja (UC Santa Cruz).
Neel Ahuja’s research explores the relationship of the body to the geopolitical and environmental contexts of colonial governance, warfare, and security. He is the author of the book Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Duke UP) and has written a series of essays on the transnational politics of human-animal relations. He is currently working on a new writing project analyzing global relationships between migration, war, and climate change.
Friday February 23rd, 12pm. Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead University).
Dr. Lousley researches in the areas of Canadian literature, environmental literary and cultural studies, feminist studies, and social and cultural theory. She is interested in the relationship between rhetorical and narrative forms and environmental politics and justice, particularly the representation and distribution of environmental risk at imagined scales of the local, national, and global. Her research in ecocriticism and contemporary Canadian literature has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Canadian Literature, Environmental Philosophy, Canadian Poetry, Essays on Canadian Writing, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and elsewhere. The Canadian authors she studies include Larissa Lai, Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, Barbara Gowdy, Thomas King, Matt Cohen, David Adams Richards, Sheldon Currie, and Douglas Coupland. Her research on cultural forms and practices of global identity during the rise of globalization and sustainable development has been published in Emotion, Space & Society and in Popular Representations of Development: Insights from Novels, Films, Television, and Social Media (Routledge, 2013).
Wednesday April 4th. Christina Gerhardt (University of Hawai‘i).
Christina Gerhardt is Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, Film and German Studies at the University of Hawaii. She is the author of Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Riseand the editor of Climate Change, Hawaii and the Pacific. She has held fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin and Columbia University and taught previously at the University of California at Berkeley.
Her writing has been published in the journals Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Environmental Humanities, Humanities, Mosaic, and in the edited volumes Water: An Atlas; and My Ocean Guide.
She will be giving a guest lecture on “Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise.”
