Programme: Tuesday 6 September
This page includes the programme for Tuesday 6 September. Follow this link for the outline programme.
Abstracts for all papers and panels are available by following the links below.
All events take place in City Campus East One (CCE1). Plenary sessions, refreshments, etc, are on the ground floor. Breakout sessions are on the second floor.
8.30 am: Coffee and Registration (Lobby)
9.00 am: Welcome Address (002)
A welcome from the President of ASLE-UKI, John Miller (University of Sheffield), and the chair of the conference organising committee, Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University).
9.15 am: Plenary 1 (002)
Samantha Walton (Bath Spa University) ‘Everybody Needs Beauty: The History, Politics and Future of “Healing Nature”‘
Chair: John Miller (University of Sheffield)
10.30 am: Coffee (Lobby)
11.00 am: Parallel Sessions 1
1.1. Medieval and Early Modern Environments
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 11.00 am – 12.45 pm
Chair: Todd Borlik (University of Huddersfield)
Room: 214
Ana Alho (University of Lisbon) Iconographic reading of the gargoyles and the respective hydraulic system in the Westminster Abbey.
Caroline Harris (Royal Holloway, University of London) The cute and the killable: reading and writing the deer hunt scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Emily Naish (University of Sheffield) ‘No wood, no Kingdome’: The Writing of Forests and the English Literary Inheritance in the Elizabethan Age
Edward Stein (University of Cambridge) In a Pickle: (Self-)Preservation in the Travel Narratives of John Taylor, the Water-Poet
1.2. Modernism and Environment
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 11.00 am – 12.45 pm
Chair: Enaie Maire Azambuja (School of Advanced Study, University of London)
Room: 221
Domonique Davies (University of Reading) Wallace Stevens’s Disanthropic Prophecies
Matthew Griffiths (Non-affiliated researcher) Beyond the Acts: Reading Virginia Woolf’s dangling pastoral in the 21st century
Sofia Roberg (Mid Sweden University) Flower, Grape Leaf, Fruit. On Cyclical Time and the Creativity of Nature in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus
1.3. New Ways of Writing
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 11.00 am – 12.45 pm
Chair: Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University)
Room: 226
Alice Carlill (Goldsmiths College, University of London) Ecological Grief and Anticipatory Mourning in Jessie Greengrass’s The High House
Natalie Joelle (Birkbeck, University of London) The Gleaners’ Alphabet: twentysix g lean stations
Cristina Peligra (Università degli Studi di Padova) Past, present and future in Zwemlessen voor later (Swimming lessons for later). Dutch climate poetry and the representation of time and its cycles.
1.4. Phenology, Cycles, and Landscape
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 11.00 am – 12.45 pm
Chair: Vera Fibisan (University of Sheffield)
Room: 213
Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh) Engaging with phenology to understand more-than-human climate change temporalities
James Kelly (Independent scholar) Time and landscape in Michel Serres’ ‘L’Incandescent’
Melina Lieb (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz/Germersheim) The Interplay of Circularity and Linearity in 21st-century Nature Diaries
Anna Selby (Manchester Metropolitan University) A Poetry Almanac
1.5. Politics and Ecocriticism (Roundtable)
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 11.00 am – 12.45 pm
Chair: John Parham (University of Worcester)
Room: 223a
Participants:
Sam Solnick (University of Liverpool)
Aidan Tynan (Cardiff University)
Pippa Marland (University of Bristol)
1.6. The Ecologies of Nation-Building: Production of Natures and Histories Across the Atlantic
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 11.00 am – 12.45 pm
Chair: Jenny Bavidge (University of Cambridge)
Room: 222
Carlos Abreu Mendoza (Texas State University) The C(o)urse of Rivers: Hydraulic Modernity in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and José María Samper
Aarti Madan (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) Estanislao Severos Zeballos, or Nineteenth-Century Argentina’s Environmental Unconscious
Enrica Renata Leydi (Bologna University) Leopardi’s Volcanic Landscape: The Broom, or the Flower of the Desert (1836)
Axel Pérez Trujillo (Durham University) Into the Vastness of the Plains: Continentalism and Colonialism in Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
12.45 pm: Lunch (Ground Floor Hub)
1.30 pm: Parallel Sessions 2
2.1. Contaminated Landscapes in Historical, Deep and Cyclical Time (Preformed Panel)
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Elizabeth Edwards (University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies)
Room: 221
Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies) Avernus in Paradise: poisoned water in the landscapes of Romantic-era Wales
Andrew Webb (Bangor University) ‘the deep dark zero’: Dylan Thomas and the contaminated landscapes of the future
Jamie Harris (Aberystwyth University) After Chernobyl: Welsh poetry and nuclear power
2.2. Crisis, Change, and Isolation through time in the English Countryside
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Tess Somervell (Worcester College, University of Oxford)
Room: 223a
Nick Pepper (Northumbria University) The countryside fortress: The conflicted experience of Northumberland’s foot-and-mouth crisis
Emma Yeo (Durham University) “the most outraigeous Daie for winde & snowe that ever did blow”: Exploring man’s relationship to weather and the natural environment in early modern diaries
Alexander Hibberts (Durham University) Countryside as Refuge: Marine Transgression and Landscape Transition at Hastings Augustinian Priory, c.1350-1417
2.3. Desert and Drought
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Vera Fibisan (University of Sheffield)
Room: 213
Ashley Cahillane (National University of Ireland, Galway) Climate Change, Drought, and Environmental Time in Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed
Hilla Peled-Shapira (Ariel University and Bar-Ilan University) The Desert in the Service of the Authorities: An Ecocritical Reading of Iraqi Literature of Exiles
2.4. Gardens
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh)
Room: 222
Joanna Dobson (Sheffield Hallam University) Strange temporalities: horticulture and the narration of trauma in WG Sebald’s The Emigrants
Varna Venugopal (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India) “I am seeing a mulberry bush but thinking pandemic”: Vegetal Temporalities during the Coronavirus Crisis
2.5. Human/Non-Human Interactions
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Mo O’Neill (University of Sheffield)
Room: 226
Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University) Bull-baiting bad; birdwatching good: Percival Stockdale, Gilbert White, and the clerical origins of the animal rights movement
Joseph Hardwick (Northumbria University) Animal Sunday, the natural world, and the problem of ‘liturgical time’ in the early twentieth-century Church of England
David Tierney (University of Liverpool) Speculating The Future of Farmed Non-human Animals
2.6. Watery Bodies, Wetlands, and Maritime Ecologies in Early Modernity (Preformed Panel)
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Rosamund Paice (Northumbria University)
Room: 214
Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) ‘A pitcht peece of reason calkt and tackled’: The Uncertainty of Early Modern Maritime Ecologies
Jemima Matthews (King’s College London) The sea made this’: Entangled maritime resources of the 1630s
Todd Borlik (University of Huddersfield) The Curse of the Wetlands: Malaria and Magic in The Witch of Edmonton
3.00 pm: Coffee (Lobby)
3.30 pm: Parallel Sessions 3
3.1. Extraction and Exploitation
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 3.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Chair: James Kelly
Room: 221
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (University of California, Davis) Temporalities of Extraction
Arthur Rose (University of Exeter) Asbestos: A Matter of Time
3.2. Narrating Rural Change: socio-ecological pasts, present and futures (Preformed Panel)
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 3.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Chair: Matthew Jarvis (Aberystwyth University)
Room: 213
Kirsti Bohata (Swansea University) Trees in Time: Afforestation and Solastalgia
Chris Pak (Swansea University) Apocalypse and Utopia: Narrating Rural Change in Welsh Science Fiction
3.3. Nuclear Narratives
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 3.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Chair: Matthew Griffiths
Room: 222
Armelle Blin-Rolland (Bangor University) 180 days, 100 000 years: Factory Farms, Industrial Slaughterhouses, Nuclear Sites and More-than-human Spacetimes in Contemporary France
Emma Davies (Bath Spa University) Chernobyl: a history of the future
Philippa Holloway (Staffordshire University) Then, Now, Forever? Researching and Writing Nuclear Landscapes for The Half-life of Snails
3.4. The Spectacle of Extinction (Preformed Panel)
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 3.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Chair: Dominic O’Key (University of Sheffield)
Room: 226
Deborah Schrijvers (University College Dublin) Moonwalking in the Berlin Zoo: Resisting Giant Panda Reproductive Regimes
Kári Driscoll (Utrecht University) Extinction as Spectacle
Hannah Boast (University College Dublin) Endangered Animals in Palestinian Film
3.5. Time, Identity, and Place
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 3.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Chair: Hilla Peled-Shapira (Bar-Ilan University and Ariel University)
Room: 214
Ana Victoria Mazza (University of Glasgow) Nervous Migrations: Landscape, Time and Identity in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
John Miller (University of Sheffield) ‘This Fearful and Stinking Pocket of Nether-Life’: Edgar Mittelholzer’s Spectral Jungle Histories
Roberta Sala (University of Turin) The return of time. Forests, wind, snow and the epochs of human existence in the poetry of Gennadij Ajgi.
3.6. Reefs and Islands
Time: Tuesday 6 September, 3.30 pm – 5.00 pm
Chair: Pippa Marland (University of Bristol)
Room: 223a
Rachel Dowse (Independent researcher) Island Identities: Place, Past and Present on Flat Holm
Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha (National University of Ireland, Galway) The abandonment of Hirta Island in Simon Ó Faoláin’s ‘Tréigint Eilean Hiort: cuimhní ceathrar’
5.00 pm: Transit break
5.10 pm: ASLE-UKI Biennial General Meeting (002)
All members of ASLE-UKI are encouraged to take part in the BGM.
6.15 pm: Wine Reception (Lobby)
Sponsored by Cambridge University Press. Includes the launch of Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2020: Land Lines and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, as well as presentation of the winners of the 2021 ASLE-UKI Book Prizes.
7.15 pm: Creative Writing Reading (002)
A medley of readings of poetry and prose on environmental themes written and read out live by ASLE-UKI members. Free and open to all. Bring your glass of wine in from the reception!