Anthropocene Narratives: One-day Symposium in Environmental Humanities

While the Anthropocene as a geological epoch remains a subject of scientific debate, the term has gained enormous currency in environmental studies, the social sciences, legal studies, and the humanities. As an idea that provokes us to think about the role of the human in endangering earth’s habitability, the Anthropocene has generated a vast body of interdisciplinary scholarship. Crucial to the field has been the rise of narratives, fictional and non-fictional, that capture the aesthetic, ethical, legal and social implications of contending with humankind’s monumental transformation of the earth system since the rise of the industrial era. 

This one-day symposium aims to bring into conversation scholars from Europe and Australia who reflect on questions of resilience, care, inhumanity, and oceanic upheaval. The symposium will serve as a forum to reflect on narrative forms that shape our awareness of planetary and environmental catastrophes as they unfold around us.

PROGRAM

9:15-9:45pm – Arrival and Coffee

9:45-10:00am – Introduction by Debjani Ganguly

10:00am-11:00am

Marco Caracciolo, Ghent University, Belgium

“Resilience and Retreat in Anthropocene Fiction.” 

11:00-12:00pm

Jordi Serrano-Munoz, Ghent University, Belgium

“Interpersonal and Environmental Care in Contemporary Disaster Fiction.”

12:00-1:30pm – Lunch

1:30pm – 2.30pm

Killian Quigley, IHSS, Australian Catholic University

“What is the Ocean Doing?”

2:30pm-3:30pm

Kathleen Birrell, La Trobe University

“Law and the Inhuman”

3:30pm-3:45pm – Short Coffee break

3:45pm-5:00pm – Roundtable and Discussion

CHAIR

Debjani Ganguly specialises in post-1945 English and global anglophone literatures. Her research is informed by postcolonial and world literary theories, new formalisms, new materialism, media ecologies, philosophies of technology and digitality, human rights discourse, and environmental concerns. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke 2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge 2005), and the editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). Her third monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is the general editor of the CUP monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. Debjani is a Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and advisory board member of the Harvard Institute for World Literature, the Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin, and the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (Bologna).

SPEAKERS

Marco Caracciolo is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. After receiving a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Bologna in 2012, he has held fellowships in Hamburg, Groningen, and Freiburg. His work has been funded by the European Research Council, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is the author of several books, including most recently Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) and Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (Bloomsbury, 2022). His articles have appeared in journals including New Literary History, PMLA, SubStance, Poetics Today, and Narrative.

Jordi Serrano-Munoz is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University in Belgium. His current research explores the relationship between literature, climate crisis, and environmental disasters in contemporary narratives, particularly from Japan, Latin America, and Australia. He is the editor and co-founder of Asiademica: Open Journal of East Asian Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in the Humanities from the Pompeu Fabra University; a Masters in literary studies from the University of Leiden; and a degree in East Asian Studies from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is the recipient of a Japan Foundation Fellowship (2021-2022), and a ‘la Caixa’ International Postgraduate Fellowship (2013-2015).

Killian Quigley is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU, and Course Coordinator, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in the National School of Arts and Humanities. He completed his PhD in English at Vanderbilt, where he earned the John M. Aden, Robert Manson Myers, and Rose Alley Press awards. He was subsequently awarded the inaugural postdoc at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. His first book, Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (2023), furnishes a novel theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned materials at the intersections of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies. His contributions to recent marine—and especially submarine—turns in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities also include the co-editorship, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea (2019) and essays on empire’s seabed ruins; marine-invertebrate animalities; narratologies of sea-level rise; the interpretation of Anthropocene ocean futures; and multispecies colour at the Great Barrier Reef.

Kathleen Birrell is Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Research in Law at La Trobe Law School. Her research adopts critical legal methodologies to explore the changing relationship between law and ecology, law and humanities and decolonial theory and praxis. She is the author of Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law (Routledge, 2016). Kathleen's current projects explore the implications of new materialism and geophilosophy for legal scholarship, practice and activism in the context of the Anthropocene. Kathleen is President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia and Editor of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. Prior to joining La Trobe Law School, Kathleen was a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her postdoctoral project was focused on encounters between juridical, political and cultural narratives in the context of climate change. She was co-editor, with Dr Daniel Matthews, of a special issue for the journal Law & Critique, entitled “Laws of the Anthropocene: Orientations, Encounters, Imaginaries” (2020).