June 28 – Urban Ecologies 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

Prof. Alan Lessoff (Illinois State University)

June 28, 2018, 6–8 p.m. (c.t.), Philosophicum I, P 15

In recent years, an environmental perspective on urban history has been transforming both urban and environmental history, by emphasizing the city as an especially intense form of human interaction with nature, rather than a site distinct from or opposed to nature. This session considers the variety of new perspectives on both cities and the environment that emerge when one researches cities as features within and influences upon the environment.

For more information see the poster.

June 18 – Climate Theories in Early American Literature 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

Prof. Michael Boyden (Uppsala University)

June 18, 2018, 12-2 p.m., P 5 (Philosophicum)

Environmental humanists routinely take their departure from the romantic ecology of the mid-
nineteenth century, dismissing earlier climate theories as racist, unscientific, or overly impressionistic. Drawing on a number of salient examples, this lecture revalues the pre-1850 period as one of intense climatic sensibility in American literary culture. It argues that early climate theories fused science and sentiment, culture and climate in ways that citizen science, public health, epigenetics, and new materialist philosophy are aspiring to do at the present juncture. Moreover, unlike modern climate science, with its reliance on statistics, remote sensing, and performance indexes, these climate theories – often anachronistically understood as environmental determinism – eschewed philosophical speculation and prioritized experiential, sensory knowledge as a crucial interface between the emotions, thought, and the natural world. The oft-lamented dualism of Western philosophy, which has been taken as the root of our troubled relation to the environment, was less pronounced in the climatic doctrines that we tend to consign to a naïve, predisciplinary phase in the history of climate awareness than in current debates on global warming. The lecture thus offers a plea for more historical awareness in the climate debate and warns against overly monolithic narratives of ecological modernization.

Michael Boyden is Associate Professor of American Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Predicting the Past: The Paradoxes of American Literary History (Leuven UP, 2009). He has a new book project underway entitled Climate and Sensibility in American Literature, 1780-1850.

You can find the event poster here.

June 12 – Biopolitics and Infrastructure 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

Prof. Christopher Breu (Illinois State University)

June 12, 2018, 6-8 p.m., P 103 (Philosophicum)

This talk draws upon biopolitical theory and Marxist theory to reinvigorate an economic, social, technological, and ecological conception of infrastructure. Given the recent material turn in critical theory, it is high time to reconsider the Marxist distinction between infrastructure and superstructure. If, during the cultural turn, the superstructure was privileged to the point of an almost complete effacement of the infrastructure (or base), in our own moment of proliferating infrastructures, biopolitical production, and ecological crisis, the concept of the infrastructure needs to be both affirmed and retheorized. This talk begins this work.

Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA.

You can find the event poster here.