The University of Gloucestershire and the International Ecolinguistics Association are pleased to announce the launch of a new open online course: The Stories We Live by: a free online course in ecolinguistics, which has been created for public benefit. More information HERE

The Raymond Williams Society postgraduate essay competition, now in its sixth year, is open to anyone studying for a higher degree (masters or doctoral) in the UK or elsewhere, or who graduated no earlier than 31 July 2015. The prize for the winning entry is 100 GBP and a year’s subscription to the Society. The winning essay will also be published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Key Words. The competition aims to encourage a new generation of scholars working in the tradition of cultural materialism, especially those whose research is rooted in the work of Raymond Williams. Entries should be 5-7,000 words in length. Full details HERE.

The Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies invites you to the sixteenth David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, hosted by Griffith University and the University of Queensland.  We welcome proposals for papers or panels on the theme ‘Natures and Spaces of Enlightenment’, broadly conceived as referring to the plurality of Enlightenments as well as the ideas and uses of nature which they endorsed, and the spaces in which they developed. Link to the website HERE

Nature, much like the feminine, has been fetishized, exoticized, and romanticized as a signifier emptied out. Gendered Ecologies and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers invites article-length typescripts (e.g., abstracts and/or 15-20 page drafts) that consider the spaces and places women writers have occupied as part of gendering the term ecology—whether masculine, feminine, or androgynous. The edition will feature three guiding principles: transhistorical, transatlantic, and transcorporeality (Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2010). Full details HERE

Announcing a fully-funded three-year PhD studentship: Theories of Loss in Cultural Representations of Extinction.

The Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC) and the School of English at the University of Sheffield are pleased to announce a fully-funded three-year full-time PhD studentship on the topic of Theories of Loss in Cultural Representations of Extinction. The project will be supervised by Robert McKay (principal supervisor) and Stefan Skrimshire (Theology and Religious Studies, University of Leeds).

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We are delighted to announce the winner of the 2017 ASLE/Inspire public lecture competition is Rachel Dowse for her illustrated talk entitled, ‘Starling Song: Murmurations of Meaning’.

The annual Institute for Sustainable Practice, Innovation and Resource Effectiveness (INSPIRE) Lecture is organised by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland (ASLE-UK). This year’s lecture takes place at the Hay Festival on Friday 2 June, at 7pm.

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Few places in England are as closely associated with wilderness as the moors and fells north of the River Trent. Yet the iconography of this region occupies a central place in the country’s cultural geography. This conference seeks to interrogate the mythologies of England’s northern uplands and to understand the ideological processes that have allowed their material reproduction, many of their less flattering significations and perhaps some of their political potential to remain hidden. This interdisciplinary conference is open to scholars working in English Literature, Cultural Studies, Creative Writing, Art History, Fine Art, Photography, Film Studies, Media Studies, Critical Heritage Studies, Geography, Politics and Sociology. Further details HERE. Download the poster HERE

The exercise of power and the experience of place are often intrinsically linked, whether through the implementation of national borders, mass surveillance of public places or the spatial control and management of the social body. At a moment in history when social and economic anxieties are once again being articulated through the politics of border control, restriction of movement, and the nation state, it seems crucial to examine the formation and experiences of landscapes of power and how we might begin to dismantle and resist them. This one-day, interdisciplinary symposium is the eleventh postgraduate workshop to be run by the Landscape, Space, Place Research Group and hosted by the Schools of English and Geography at the University of Nottingham. Full details HERE.

Gothic and horror fictions have long functioned as vivid reflections of contemporary cultural fears. Now, more than ever, the environment has become a locus of those fears for many people, and this conference seeks to investigate the wide range of Gothic- and horror-inflected texts that tackle the darker side of nature. Gothic Nature seeks to address this question, interrogating the place of non-human nature in horror and the Gothic today, and showcasing the most exciting and innovative research currently being conducted in the field.  Academic papers from a variety of different subject backgrounds, as well as interdisciplinary work are welcome, as are creative submissions from artists and performers. Weblink HERE.

The University of Worcester is offering a funded PhD studentship in ‘Green Media and Cultural Studies’. The studentship is a tax-free bursary of £13,863 p.a. for three years. Further details can be found HERE or by e-mailing Dr John Parham at j.parham@worc.ac.uk. Link to the website HERE.