Programme: Wednesday 30 August 2023
This page includes the programme for Wednesday 30 August.
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 502 Teaching Hub, University of Liverpool.
8.30am: Registration and Refreshments (Upstairs Social Space — all refreshments will be held here throughout the conference)
9.00am: Welcome Address (Lecture Theatre 2)
A welcome from the President of ASLE-UKI, John Miller (University of Sheffield), and the chair of the conference organising committee, Sam Solnick (University of Liverpool).
9.15am: Plenary 1 (Lecture Theatre 2)
Roundtable: ‘Future Transitions’ – Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London); Graeme Macdonald (University of Warwick) and Chris Pak (Swansea University)
Chair: Will Slocombe
Zoom link for welcome and opening plenary: https://liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91618310528?pwd=eWhqM29Pemh6TzJCSDNYOFdhRm1kZz09
Meeting ID: 916 1831 0528
Passcode: G$*yp4N=
10.30am: Break
11.00am: Parallel Sessions 1
Zoom link for ALL WEDNESDAY PANELS (click link and then choose the breakout room that corresponds to the physical room in which the panel is taking place): https://liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/94219179777?pwd=NjV3Y3RLNUR3TENGcFJNZWxyWlI1QT09
Meeting ID: 942 1917 9777
Passcode: V=LB3*Dw
1.1 (Re)processing Animals
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Brycchan Carey
Room: Lecture Theatre 1
Armelle Blin-Rolland (Bangor University) Mobilities and immobilities in French postcolonial zoos
David Tierney (University of Liverpool) Talking Animals and Silent Humans
Delphine Gatehouse (King’s College London) A Woodworm Approach
Shasha Cai (University of Leeds) The Liminality of Fox Spirits in Chinese Zhiguai
1.2 Hydrocarbon Landscapes and the Petro-Imaginary
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Fred Carter
Room: Lecture Theatre 2
Anne Schmalstig (Texas A&M University at Qatar) Postpetroleum Ecologies: Reimagining Sea and Landscapes in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon
Zuhmboshi Nsuh (The University of Yaounde I, Cameroon) Environmental Terrorism and the Human Condition in Postcolonial Narratives: Reading Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were
Abiodun Fakemi (Keele University) Exploring Juvenile Somaterratic Experience in Christie Watson’s Tiny Sunbirds Far Away
Maria Sledmere (University of Strathclyde) ‘A cinder signal’: Petromelancholia and Anthropocene Gurlesque
1.3 Transitional Landscapes
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Terry Gifford
Room: Lecture Theatre 3
Paul Knowles (University of Manchester) Transiting from the Edenic-pastoral to the post-pastoral in Kevin Barry, Colin Barrett, and Danielle McLaughlin’s short stories
Amy Le Grys (Bath Spa University) Writing the Mountainscape: Literary Impressionism, Changeability and Aesthetics in Late Modern British Mountain Literature
Rosamund Paice (Northumbria University) From Whittlesea Mere to the ‘Pond on Wittring Heath’: Mildmay Fane and Familiar Waters
1.4 I Follow Rivers: Fluvial Transitions
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Vera Fibisan
Room: Teaching Room 5
Gemma Curto (The University of Sheffield) Living at Scamander’s Water Edge in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Aim King (Aberystwyth University) Transmateriality and walking with other-than-human river ecologies
Jemima Matthews (King’s College London) “as Water mill, made rags and shreds to sweate”: Fluvial bodies and fluminous geographies
1.5 Text/Image/Archive/Action: Creative Engagements with Past, Present and Future Environments (Roundtable)
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Harriet Tarlo
Room: Flex 1
Participants:
David Borthwick (University of Glasgow)
JR Carpenter (University of Southampton)
Lucy Burnett (Lancaster University)
Mike Collier (The University of Sunderland)
Judith Tucker (University of Leeds)
1.6 Eco-Medievalisms I: Landscapes of Apocalypse, Flood, and Wilderness
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Catherine Evans
Room: Teaching Room 6
Emma Nuding (The University of York) Reading Fenland with the Monastic Ecopoetics of Henry de Avranches’ Vita Guthlaci
Lynn Butzlaff (The University of York) Re-thinking Wilderness in the Poetic Edda
Abigail Bleach (Manchester University) Navigating the Eco-Medieval with Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘The Wake’
Carl Kears (King’s College London) The Boat-as-Archive: The Poetic and Scholarly Journeys of Bill Griffiths
1.7 Wild Margins: Spaces for Transition
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Matthew Griffiths
Room: Flex 2
John Miller (The University of Sheffield) The Psychedelic Ecology of Lee Sung Jin’s Beef
Carolin Böttcher (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) The Circle of a Year: Time and the Environment in Kerri Ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone
Sundhya Walther (University of Manchester) Unwilding: Denizen Futures and the End of the Wild
Cathy Turner (University of Exeter): Tea’s transitions in UK-based performances.
1.8 Tipping Points: Discourse, Narrative, Politics (Roundtable)
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 11.00am – 12.45pm
Chair: Ben Smith
Room: Teaching Room 4
Participants:
Leo Steeds (University of Glasgow)
Clementina Gentile Fusillo (The University of Sheffield)
Giulia Champion (University of Southampton)
Theo Aiolfi (CY Cergy Paris University)
Mekhala Dave (TBA21 Academy)
12.45pm: Lunch
1.30pm: Parallel Sessions 2
2.1 Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Loss
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: David Higgins
Room: Lecture Theatre 1
Niall Oddy (The Open University) Environmental Anxiety in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century? The Example of Rabelais’ ‘Fourth Book’
Jasmin Kirkbride (City, University of London) The writer’s fragments: navigating the role boundaries of Creative Writing teacher, editor, and therapist in climate literature
Matthias Stephan (Aarhus University) Narratives of the Anthropocene: Affective Responses to Climate Trauma
2.2 Re-Situating Ecopoetics
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Sarah Daw
Room: Teaching Room 4
Veronika Arutyunyan (University of Hamburg) Transformations of Lyric Voice in Contemporary Ecopoetry
Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha (Ollscoil na Gaillimhe, Éire) Tradition and Transition in Modern Irish-Language Poetry
Rosie Dymond (Bangor University) ‘Hon ydyw’r afon’: Transitions in place-time in the later poems of R. Williams Parry
2.3 Beastly Capital and Extractivist Ecologies
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Hannah Boast
Room: Lecture Theatre 2
Arush Pande (Princeton University) The Beasts of Capital, the Ghosts of Nature: Environmental Justice in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio
Bushra Mahzabeen (University of Warwick) Rampant Capitalism and Violent Modernism of Angolan Oil Extraction Zone in Pepetela’a Narrative
Julia Ditter (University of Konstanz) Extractive Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
2.4 Transition and Environment in Local Communities in Wales
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Andy Webb
Room: Flex 1
Linden Peach (School of Traditional Arts) Ely Cardiff Not Cambridge: Peter Finch’s Environmental Writings
Francesca Brooks (York University) ‘Falling into precipice and monastery’: local Welsh environments in Lynette Roberts’s wartime writing
Jamie Harris (Aberystwyth University) Transition and the environment in new town settlement in Raymond Williams’s The Fight for Manod
2.5 Fantastic Entanglements and Latourian Legacies
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Peter Sands
Room: Teaching Room 5
Philip Dickinson (Lancaster University) Terrestrialising the Novel: Williams, Latour, and The Swan Book
Tarn MacArthur (University of St Andrews) Bitumen: Karen Solie’s Mapping of a Modern Hybrid
Hilary Bowling (University of Liverpool) ‘tower or tunnel?’’: weird border transgressions and climate change in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy
2.6 Varieties of Religious Experience
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Kennedy Dragt
Room: Flex 2
Enaie Maire Azambuja (School of Advanced Study, University of London) Zen-inflected transitions in E. E. Cummings’ ecopoetic imagination
Alfie Howard (University of Leeds) Snake Words in Estonia: Andrus Kivirähk’s ‘The Man Who Spoke Snakish’
Catherine Evans (University of Manchester) Glass beehives: Making the synthetic “natural” in Early Modern England
2.7 Terraqueous Mappings
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 1.30 pm – 3.00 pm
Chair: Susanne Ferwerda
Room: Lecture Theatre 3
John Wedgwood Clarke (University of Exeter) Red River: A River in Pieces: the poetics of becoming disrupted in a long river poem
Mandy Bloomfield (University of Plymouth) “From the Open Sea”: Muriel Rukeyser’s ecopoetics of the shoreline
Ben Smith (University of Exeter) Ghost Nets and Phantom Islands: Mapping the Anthropocene
3.00pm: Coffee (Room TBC)
3.15pm: Parallel Sessions 3
3.1 Speculative Nature Writing: Feeling for the Future
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: Jos Smith
Room: Lecture Theatre 1
Jos Smith (University of East Anglia) Speculative Form: Affect, Anticipation
Hetty Saunders (University of London) Speculative Nature Writing: Editing the Anthology
Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University) Truelove’s Tiger: Nature Writing Deranged
3.2 Energy Transitions in Long Modernity
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: Greg Lynall
Room: Lecture Theatre 3
Tiffany Werth (University of California-Davis) Fuelling Space Travel Before Fossil Fuels
Liam Lewis (University of Liverpool) Bio-Acoustic Energy in Medieval Bestiary and Song
Todd Borlik (University of Huddersfield) Monstrous Energy in Forbidden Planet
3.3 Won’t Somebody Think of the Children
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: Demi Wilton
Room: Flex 2
Jane Ekstam (Østfold University College, Halden, Norway) The climate crisis: A complex, all-ecompassing and fast-moving phenomenon. How stories can help us to understand and act
Sara Shahwan (Goldsmiths, University of London) Becoming-with the ‘Breeze’: The Flow between Self and Space in the Imagination of Migrant Young People
Helen Moore (University of Gloucestershire) and Rowan Middleton (University of Gloucestershire ) ECOPOETIKON: Global ecopoetries as transition towards regenerative cultures
3.4 Displaced Futures
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: Christie Oliver-Hobley
Room: Flex 1
Ray Davenport (Plymouth University) Climate Trauma: Reclaiming Equanimity in James Bradley’s Clade and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High we go in the Dark
Demi Wilton (Loughborough University) Environmental Displacement and Anthropocenic Futures in Contemporary Chinese Fiction
Karl Kristian Swane Bambini (Østfold University College) Norwegian Futurisms: Posthumanism and the Norwegian Nordic Model in Tor Åge Bringsværd’s Du og Jeg, Alfred and Alfred 2.0
3.5 Eco-Medievalisms II: Avian Landscapes, Languages, and Travels
Time: Wednesday 30 August, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: Francesca Brooks
Room: Teaching Room 6
Becca Drake (The University of York) The Avian Journeys and Environments of ‘Örvar-Odds saga’
Jessie Summerhayes (The University of York) Occupying Bird-Space in Anglo-Saxon Literature
Shona Turner (The University of York) Cuthbert’s Interactions with Birds in the ‘Vitae’
3.6 Feeling Scared Yet?: Gothic and Horror Ecologies
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: John Miller
Room: Lecture Theatre 2
David Ingram (Independent scholar) Folk horror as eco-horror: energy transition and taboo in ‘The Feast (Gwledd)’ (2021)
Madeleine Sinclair (University of Warwick) “The city’s great garbage can”: Slow Violence and Lovecraftian Horror in Mariana Enríquez’s “Under The Black Water”
Samantha Walton (Bath Spa University) EcoGothic Atmospherics: On air, terror, and gothic ecopoetics
3.7 Soil and Stone
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: Jude Piesse
Room: Teaching Room 5
Jim Scown (Cardiff University) Unstable Views of Nature: Beyond the Whole in Humboldt’s Romantic Ecology
Chris Pak (Swansea University) Speculating About Agricultural Catastrophe in A.G. Street’s Already Walks Tomorrow (1938)
Anne Elvey (Monash University and University of Divinity) Ancestries of stone: poetic inquiries
3.8 Ambulatory Environmentalisms
Time: Wednesday 30 August 2023, 3.15pm – 4.45pm
Chair: Anna Burton
Room: Teaching Room 4
Nikolemma Polyxeni Dimitriou (The University of Sheffield) Walking in the Dark as a Form of Transition in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (written 1940, first published 1977)
Rachel Dowse (Independent Scholar) Digital Transitions: How video games recreate the nature walk
Kat Waters (University of Leeds) Radical Heritage and Environmental Protest in Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass
4.45pm: Break
5.00pm: ASLE-UKI Biennial General Meeting (Lecture Theatre 2)
All members of ASLE-UKI are encouraged to take part in the BGM.
BGM Zoom Link: https://liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91948020137?pwd=QjlJY2tsaEZ5blpRaCttR3ZqWFlxUT09
Meeting ID: 919 4802 0137
Passcode: C#8yS.fb
6.00pm: Wine Reception (Upstairs Social Space)
Drinks kindly sponsored by Liverpool University Press in celebration of the launch of their new Literature and Environment book series. Reception includes the announcement of the winners of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize
7.00pm: Poetry Reading (Lecture Theatre 2)
A medley of readings of poetry on environmental themes from ASLE-UKI members. Free and open to all. Bring your glass of wine in from the reception!
After the reception/reading you may well be very hungry! We’ve listed some nearby restaurants on the main conference page