This symposium, co-organized by The University of Sussex Centre for American Studies and the Université Paris Cité/LARCA, with the support of the British Academy, CHASE and the SSRP, will begin with a CHASE Environmental Humanities Publishing Roundtable aimed at postgraduates. Then, across three panels, participants will explore the implications of how  subsurface ecologies have been represented in American and Anglophone literatures since the eighteenth century. The symposium will culminate in a plenary address by Professor Dana Luciano (Rutgers) whose recent book, How the Earth Feels, rethinks how geology as an emergent science related to questions of life, race, indigeneity, the human, and biopolitics in nineteenth-century US culture.

Schedule of Events

9-10.30: CHASE AHRC Roundtable: “How to Get Published in the Environmental Humanities”

10.30-10.50: Coffee break and arrival of conference participants

Subsurface Ecologies Symposium

10.50 Introduction: Michael Jonik (Sussex)

11-12.30 Panel 1: Holes in the Ground
Chair: Tess Milner

• Christine Okoth (KCL): “Labour and the Inexhaustible Novel”
• Jesse Oak Taylor (University of Washington): “Quarrying Catastrophe”
• Maisie Ridgway (Worcester University): “Coal Archives: Inscribing the Anthropocene in Northwest Leicestershire”

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-15.00 Panel 2: (Sub)Surface Biomaterialities
Chair: Alice Dodds (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

• Chris Bates (Sussex): “Exhuming the Ecocidal Roots of Edgar Huntly and the Mason
• and Dixon Line”
• Jeremy Davies (Leeds): “Peat Moss, Wood, and Unhidden Depths.”
• Natalia Cecire (Sussex): ‘This Compost: Biomass, Bioremediation, and the Dream of Wasteless Waste”

15.00-16.30 Panel 3: Subsurface Imaginaries
Chair: Chris Bates (Sussex)

• Michael Jonik: ‘Thoreau Thinks of Swamps’
• Cécile Roudeau (Paris Citéé): “The Queer Climates of Jewett's A Marsh Island (1885): New England Wetlands and the Test of the Longue Duréée.”
• Thomas Dutoit (Lille): “Melville Underground”

16.30-16.45: Break

16.45-18.15 Plenary Lecture by Professor Dana Luciano (Rutgers): "Settler Geology and the End(s) of the World."
Chair: Michael Jonik (Sussex)

18.15-19.30 Drinks Reception

Any questions regarding the event can be sent to Chris Bates (C.Bates@sussex.ac.uk) or Michael Jonik (M.Jonik@sussex.ac.uk).

Posted on behalf of: School of Media, Arts and Humanities
Last updated: Thursday, 25 April 2024