as of march 30, 2016...2016/03/30 · seminar topic, rationale and significance 3 2. problems and...
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As of March 30, 2016
*if different from Chief Executive Officer or President. For grants to Liberal Arts Colleges, the principal investigator is the president or
chief academic officer of the college, unless instructed otherwise.
**person responsible for serving as a proposal liaison and providing reports to the Foundation, if applicable.
PROPOSAL INFORMATION SHEET
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Organization Information
Date of Submission: 03/30/2016
Organization Legal Name
(as it appears on your IRS determination letter): Georgetown University
Also Known As, or Doing Business As (if applicable):
Organization Legal Address: 37th and O Streets, NW
Washington, DC 20057-1789
Secondary Mailing Address
(if applicable):
Office of Advancement
3300 Whitehaven Street, NW, Suite 4000
Washington, DC 20007
Fiscal Year End Date: 06/30/2016
Proposal Information
Title or Description: Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change
Requested Amount: $175,000
Grant Start Date: 10/01/2016
Grant End Date: 09/30/2018
Contact Information
Chief Executive
Officer/President
Principal Investigator(s)* Financial Officer* Grant Management Contact**
Name: John J. DeGioia Dana Luciano Marc Peters Jean Fallow
Title: President Associate Professor
Department of English
Assistant Director Grants and Contracts
Administrator
Email: President@georgeto
wn.edu
Dana.Luciano@georgeto
wn.edu
[email protected] sponsoredprograms@georgetow
n.edu
Phone: 202-687-4134 202-687-7431 202-687-4126 202-687-7345
Fax: 202-687-6660 202-687-5445 202-687-2054 202-687-4555
Mailing
Address
(if different from above):
Healy Hall 204
37th and O Streets,
NW
Washington, DC
20057
New North 336
37th and O Streets, NW
Washington, DC 20057
Sponsored Projects
Financial Operations
2121 Wisconsin Avenue,
NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20007
Office of Sponsored Programs
Box 571168
Washington, DC 20057-1168
Assistant
Name
(if applicable):
Carma Fauntleroy
Assistant
Email:
Carma.Fauntleroy@
georgetown.edu
Assistant
Phone:
202-687-1023
As of March 30, 2016
*if different from Chief Executive Officer or President. For grants to Liberal Arts Colleges, the principal investigator is the president or
chief academic officer of the college, unless instructed otherwise.
**person responsible for serving as a proposal liaison and providing reports to the Foundation, if applicable.
Contact Information
Principal Investigator
Name: John McNeill
Title: University Professor
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 202-687-5585
Fax: 202-687-7245
Mailing
Address
(if different
from
above):
ICC 614
37th and O Streets, NW
Washington, DC 20057
Contact Information
Principal Investigator
Name: Nathan Hensley
Title: Assistant Professor
Department of English
Email: Nathan.Hensley@george
town.edu
Phone: 202-687-5297
Fax: 202-687-5445
Mailing
Address
(if different
from above):
New North 316
37th and O Streets, NW
Washington, DC 20057
Approaching the Anthropocene:
Global Culture and Planetary Change
A Proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
for the John E. Sawyer Seminars
on the Comparative Study of Cultures
Georgetown University
Directors:
Dana Luciano, Associate Professor of English
John R. McNeill, University Professor
Nathan K. Hensley, Assistant Professor of English
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Table of Contents
1. Seminar Topic, Rationale and Significance 3 2. Problems and Perspectives 6 3. Thematic Threads and Seminar Structure 8 4. Institutional Resources and Suitability 11 5. Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellows 12 6. Seminar Directors and Participants 13 Appendix 1: Budget 15 Appendix 2: Preliminary Seminar Plan: 16 Proposed Sessions and Speakers Appendix 3: Seminar Directors’ CVs 20
3 1. Seminar Topic, Rationale and Significance The proposed Sawyer Seminar, Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change, will bring together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences, law, and medicine in order to assess the role of humanistically-oriented interdisciplinary thought in confronting the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. The term “Anthropocene” names a proposed new epoch in planetary history intended to recognize that human activity has left a permanent record in the strata of the earth and altered the course of biotic evolution.1 Since the term first appeared in print in 2000, and especially since 2008, when the International Commission on Stratigraphy approved a Working Group to explore the possibility of adopting formally this designation, the Anthropocene concept has gained traction both within and beyond the academy. It places our understanding of the contemporary environmental crisis on a geological scale, directing us to a vastly extended past no less than to a deep future. In so doing, the Anthropocene demands that we comprehend anew the complex interrelations between our own time and others, local contexts and planetary scale. The proposed Sawyer Seminar seeks both to demonstrate the necessity of humanistic inquiry in the present era of environmental change, and to explore how humanities scholars (both within and beyond the environmental humanities) can better prepare for what lies ahead. The Anthropocene has not yet been formally proposed to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, and may not be adopted even when it is. But within the humanities, the epoch has already arrived, as evidenced by its ever-more frequent appearance in journal articles, special issues, and book titles; a new humanities-based book series, AnthropoScene, is forthcoming from the Pennsylvania State University Press. The rapidity with which the term has been adopted indexes a deeply-felt sense of the urgency of this historical moment, and the consequent need for a new term to name it and a new narrative to frame that urgency. Appeals to the Anthropocene sharpen to the point of crisis the problems traditionally addressed by environmental humanists. Indeed, the coalescence of the environmental humanities into a widely-recognized academic field, marked by the proliferation of undergraduate and graduate programs and the establishment of two new peer-reviewed journals, Environmental Humanities (started in 2012) and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (started in 2013) has paralleled the general adoption of the Anthropocene concept. “Environmental humanities” designates more than the grouping together of various established concentrations within discrete humanities disciplines (literary/cultural eco-criticism, environmental history, philosophy of ecology, et cetera); it constitutes a new synthesis that seeks to change the disciplinary landscape by attending to scientific and social-scientific scholarship on environmental questions while refusing to accept the secondary importance of humanistic knowledge with respect to those questions. As the editors of Environmental Humanities explain, the field might be understood as “an effort to enrich environmental research with a more extensive conceptual vocabulary, whilst at the same time vitalizing the humanities by rethinking the ontological exceptionality of the human.”2 The Anthropocene concept endows this dual project with an epochal significance, demanding a radical transformation of knowledge for the sake of survival. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s assertion, in his 2008 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” that the Anthropocene signals a “collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” attracted significant attention by making the foundational belief of the well-established sub-discipline of environmental
1 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene.” IGPB Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17-18. 2 Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cooke, Matthew Kearnes, and Emily O’Gorman, “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 2.
4 history into a broad-based intellectual and ethical imperative.3 The recognition of our species as possessing geological agency, Chakrabarty contended, requires that we “scale up our imagination of the human.”4 Yet it also demands that we recognize the active agency of the nonhuman environment. This dual reframing demands that we bring an understanding of the intimate enmeshment of human and nonhuman into all humanistic endeavors, realizing that there is no context in which the “human” and the “environment” can be definitively separated. We might say, then, that the goal of Anthropocene-oriented knowledge projects is to make the designation “environmental humanities” effectively redundant: all humanities work must now take into consideration factors of nonhuman nature formerly considered the domain of earth and natural sciences. Regardless of whether a given humanities-based field of inquiry is explicitly concerned with questions traditionally framed as “environmental,” our necessarily altered understanding of humans and their contexts put forth within the Anthropocene demand attention. The problem before us is twofold, and demands both pragmatic and philosophical approaches. Under the sign of the Anthropocene, the present is understood as a time apart from the past, requiring an unprecedented global effort: the development of what Crutzen and Stoermer called a “world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human-induced stresses.”5 The cultivation of a world-wide response, at a moment when the world is at once bound ever more closely together by the global impact of anthropogenic climate change, yet increasingly fragmented by radical wealth and resource inequality, is a task which will require not only the coordinated intervention of policy-makers and scientists, but also the critical, ethical and creative skills of humanists. Yet the necessity of active participation in global strategic discussions is complicated, for humanists, by the fact that the Anthropocene concept challenges many of our most centrally held categories for thought. The current environmental crisis situates human beings within vast networks of interconnection: assemblages of biotic, lithic, and elemental agents whose complex interrelation -- and not any single, willed action -- generates consequential change.6 The paradox, then, is that even as it acknowledges human impact on planetary systems, the Anthropocene also complicates the place of humans on the planet, unsettling convictions that have long been central to humanities scholarship. What, we ask, might the humanities become in an epoch that demands that we no longer treat humanity as exceptional? How do we understand “culture” -- the traditional focus of humanistic study -- when it can no longer clearly be separated from a category called “nature”? How do we grapple with the thought of human extinction, of a world without us, when we can no longer safely defer that possibility to a dim, distant future? Critical Anthropocene thinking must take up the task of renovating or wholly remaking many of the central presuppositions of humanistic method in light of the increasingly challenged figure of the “human.” The material pressures of the Anthropocene also demand the rapid renovation of our frameworks for justice and our conception of ethics. Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a human rights crisis, inflicting significant damage to human lives and communities and promising far more. These human costs are distributed in unequal ways, with the worst effects of climate change falling on impoverished regions, marginalized communities, and nonwhite bodies. This asymmetry has led to one of the most common critiques of the term “Anthropocene”: pointing to the entire species, Anthropos, as cause of the current crisis, they argue, falsely universalizes the planetary impact it seeks to register, when fossil-fuel use and other carbon-emission-intensive activities are disproportionately practiced in wealthier, more developed nations. A species-wide framework, it is
3 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 201; John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-century World. New York: Norton & London: Penguin, 2001. 4 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 206. 5 Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” 18. 6 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45.1 (2014): 1-18.
5 argued, overlooks histories of economic exploitation and racial stratification, which can rarely be read in the geological record, but which cannot be ignored in developing a global perspective on the crisis. As Rob Nixon comments, “We may all be in the Anthropocene, but we are not all in it in the same way.”7 Supporters of the idea counter that it brings into view the potential extinction of the human species as a result of climate catastrophe. We may not all have caused the present crisis equally, they argue, but if action isn’t taken, we will all suffer equally in the end. Yet this perspective, what Chakrabarty identifies as a “negative universal history,” projected backward from a hypothetical future in order to avert that future, cannot eclipse the present, nor should it homogenize diverse global cultures as we move toward a planetary solution, a “world-wide accepted strategy.”8 The task of negotiating these points of view, toggling back and forth between a deep future and a diffuse and divided present, and switching tactically between local and global perspectives, requires an expansive humanistic attention to culture. Compounding the reduced attention that impoverished regions and populations often receive from developed countries is the difficulty of seeing the diffuse spatial and temporal impacts of environmental harm. Many forms of environmental damage -- flooding and displacement, destruction of crops and livestock, habitat destruction -- are immediate. But environmental crisis can also work by what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence,” emerging over decades, wearing away social infrastructures as it slowly contaminates entire populations.9 The 1984 toxic gas leak at the Union Carbide Factory in Bhopal, India, for instance, has recently been assessed as “three disasters”: the leak itself, the radically insufficient response thereto, and the water contamination, which continues into the present. In this sense, environmental disasters, especially in impoverished areas, where national and international responses may be inadequate, possess both “acute” and “chronic” phases.10 The challenge for engaged humanities scholarship in these cases is twofold. First, we must cultivate an ethical sensibility that is sustainable over long periods of time. But in order to accomplish this, we must also, as Nixon stresses, find ways to make slow, stretched-out processes appear in a world attuned to ever-more-rapid news cycles and distracted by “compassion fatigue.”11 Locating forms and genres that help us to comprehend the slow violence of anthropogenic environmental damage as violence, and to respond appropriately even when its causes appear distant in time and space, is an ever-more pressing challenge for humanists as the global effects of climate change both supplement and intensify the kind of local environmental disasters typified by Bhopal.
7 Rob Nixon, “The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea,” Edge Effects, November 6, 2014. Accessed March 25, 2016 from http://edgeeffects.net/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls/. 8 Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” 18. 9 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. 10 The Free Library. S.v. Introduction: Bhopal and after.." Accessed Mar 25, 2016 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Introduction%3a+Bhopal+and+after.-a0396526949 11 Nixon, Slow Violence; Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999).
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2. Problems and Perspectives
The proposed seminar draws inspiration from ongoing conversations in and around the environmental humanities as well as the sciences and social sciences. We will work at once with conjectural and philosophical approaches and the more pragmatic orientation of environmental science and policy. Over the two years of the seminar, we will consider the extent to which the Anthropocene demands a radical rupture in and remaking of the humanities, and of intellectual inquiry in general, as many have claimed; or, conversely, an intensification, diversification and large-scale diffusion of work already taking place within the environmental humanities. In balancing the demands of continuity and change, we hope to develop an outlook that is at once attentive to the crisis framework of the Anthropocene and attuned to the patient, speculative and conceptual labor of the humanities.
The selected “cases” will therefore be organized around conceptual problems to be pursued. Each of these concerns an area of inquiry upon which the Anthropocene places particular pressure. Some of these, such as genres and media, are long-standing concerns that demand to be rethought under the sign of the Anthropocene. Others are configurations which only come into view with the recognition that humanity now constitutes a geological force, while remaining a biologically vulnerable entity. These cases are listed below along with brief explanations. Proposed speakers for each case are listed in Appendix 2.
Humanities Futures. Overarching frame for the seminar, to be inaugurated by a panel considering the transdisciplinary purview and new methodological practices demanded by the Anthropocene.
Extinction and Life. Situates the recent past, present and future in light of the current extinction event; considers processes and effects of extinction and their relation to the valuation of life.
Rethinking the Human. Explores emergent theories (networked agency, assemblage theory, transmateriality) that depart from the conventional notion of the human as bounded, sovereign entity.
Risk and Precarity. Highlights new formulations of risk that come into view as a result of the radically unpredictable nature of climate crisis, along with forms of vulnerability and precarity (such as the emergent category of the “climate refugee”).
Trash Culture. Explores our notions of “waste” and materiality, encompassing both tangible and less tangible effects of the current crisis (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; carbon-climate feedback loops), and considers new possibilities for cultural as well as material approaches to the problem of waste.
Aesthetics, Representation, Justice. Develops forms and frameworks that help make environmental harm dispersed over long durations and diffuse spaces visible; questions the most effective and accurate ways of representing climate change and other effects too large to be seen.
Interspecies Relations. Rethinks human/animal/plant relations in light of increased vulnerability and ongoing transformation of biosystems.
Sustainability: Cultures. Gives both located and global attention to the erosion of cultures and life-worlds in the light of climate crisis, including the displacement of affected populations, conquest of indigenous lands past and present, and intercultural conflicts exacerbated by environmental pressures.
7 Sustainability: Institutions. Inquiries into the kinds of short- and long-range transformation needed to sustain institutions, with particular attention to higher education. Encompasses both pragmatic questions (“green” campuses, funding for education) and speculative (disciplinary transformation). Because ethics, along with the connected question of justice, is not only a core theme but in many ways the ultimate target of our inquiry in this seminar, and because, as we observed above, the uneven distribution of harm and risk demands analytic frameworks that are at once planetary in scope and attentive to particular and local considerations, the seminar will be especially attentive to located perspectives, both regionally and conceptually. For each “case,” we will prioritize invited speakers who highlight particular cultural, regional and critical approaches central to the seminar’s ethical horizons. Seminar participants who specialize in these areas will highlight work that gives attention to globally marginalized regions (for instance, south Asia, Africa) and that is shaped by analytic frameworks such as critical race theory, feminism, and queer theory. It is our contention that the Anthropocene’s global reach does not diminish the importance of located fields of thought, but rather, endows them with new importance and vitality.
8 3. Thematic Threads and Seminar Structure Three overarching themes will guide the proposed Sawyer Seminar: Temporality, Agency, and Ethics. These themes have many points of overlap, and we expect them to intersect in interesting ways in seminar presentations and discussions; indeed, their inseparability in the Anthropocene context is precisely the point of the seminar. Temporality Most humanities disciplines begin, by definition, with human culture, and are thus implicitly structured around a division between human and pre-human times. Even as the geological timeframe invoked in the Anthropocene concept demands that we attend to pre- (and perhaps post-) human ages, the massiveness of this timeframe also contains an inhuman dimension, stretching beyond what humans can ordinarily imagine. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the difficulty of grasping geological time: “an abstract, intellectual understanding of deep time comes easily enough…. Getting it into the gut is another matter.”12 Gould argues that deep time can only be grasped through metaphor, affirming the centrality of humanists to Anthropocene conversations. Humanities scholars have grappled with deep time in various ways in the past decade. Wai Chee Dimock, for instance, engages the geological timescale as an argument for a new “planetary” frame for literary study, using deep time as a means of undoing the overly-narrow national and period divides imposed by the last century of literary and cultural scholarship.13 Still others use deep time to reintroduce ontological thinking into humanistic study: in Mark McGurl’s terms, “position[ing] culture in a time-frame large enough to crack open the carapace of human self-concern, exposing it to the idea, and maybe even the fact, of its external ontological preconditions, its ground.”14 One of the pressing questions of the Anthropocene, then, will be whether we can think in timeframes expansive enough to address the interdependence of human and nonhuman time. A related question concerns how we might hope to make the slow time of environmental processes legible in their unfolding, especially when even the most rapid environmental change can look, from the point of view of our fixed perspectives, like stasis. Articulating forms and genres to convey the diffuse temporality of environmental activity is a project to which humanists are uniquely suited to respond. In an astonishing book called Maps of Time (2004), David Christian attempts to tell the history of the present in all of its nested timescales, locating the human storylines of modernization, industrialization, and even species evolution within the geological and cosmic timeframes that dwarf them. (Were the entire 13 billion year history of the universe represented as 13 years, he explains, complex organisms would have been alive for about 7 months; agricultural human societies for only 5 minutes, and industrial civilization a mere 6 seconds.) How can the humanities help parse these radically mismatched scales of time?15 Agency Humanities scholarship advances by articulating nuanced and complex models of historical causation and cultural exchange, expanding networks of actors so as to see more clearly and definitively how change happens. But even as we work with increasing sophistication to model historical agency, we remain, on the whole, confined to construing these models in human terms. Though Western philosophy -- and through it, humanistic method -- has downplayed for centuries the part the planet plays in human life, it is no longer possible to ignore nonhuman forces as they
12 Stephen Jay Gould, Time Arrow, Time’s Cycle, p. 3. 13 See Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 14 McGurl, “The New Cultural Geology,” Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3-4 (2011): 380. 15 David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004.
9 actively shape and transform our material, economic, and social conditions. Philosopher Bruno Latour has observed that “Earth has now taken back all the characteristics of a full-fledged actor.”16 This acknowledgement of nonhuman agency and its capacity to alter our own histories threatens to displace notions of the bounded individual subject that have structured political and social life in the West from the Enlightenment forward. Instead of the self-contained sovereign bodies we inherit from thinkers ranging from Descartes to John Stuart Mill, recent work has instead posited porous materials, “congregational agencies” and what Mel Y. Chen calls “animacies.”17 Frameworks of interactive agency, hybrid causation, and what eco-feminist critic Stacey Alaimo calls “trans-corporeality” all reconceive the human body not as a bounded system but as an interface, a medium for connectivity that is affected by material and environmental forces outside itself and remains, to a large extent, outside its own control.18 We will examine the varying scales of agency demanded by our new climatological era: political agency at communal, national, and international/global scales; climatological agency at the planetary and cosmological planes; and conceptual agency, as we work to generate new ways of thinking adequate to the present and to develop notions of human capacity and action adequate to the changing planet.
Ethics Even as the Anthropocene distends humanistic timescales and disrupts traditional conceptions of human action, it also reverberates at the level of everyday life. Refugee crises, resource wars and outbreaks of once-localized disease, all confirm that climate change is already becoming an ethical and political crisis of global proportions.19 This thread of the seminar directly addresses the ethical dilemmas gathered under the sign of the Anthropocene, problems that are at once speculative and pragmatic. It brings into focus issues for applied justice like climate refugees, displaced communities, and vanished homelands, as well as the challenges of food shortages and the widening chasm separating those who can count on clean water and basic safety from those who cannot. At the same time, it poses a series of related but distinct questions that reach to the core of what the philosophical work of ethics has been since Plato. How can we imagine an ethical life when neither the category of the “human” nor that of “nature” no longer seems capable of providing a reliable anchor?20 And how can we consider enduring questions of human value in the face of dramatically expanded timelines that reach beyond our species, to a future beyond human endurance? Papers, panels, and presentations will connect the themes above both causally and conceptually. For instance, we can envision papers discussing the effect that the expanded temporal framework of the Anthropocene necessarily exerts on human agency, but also that these concerns have always been connected philosophically and/or historically. Structure of the Seminar We envision the Sawyer Seminar as a two-year process. The first year (Fall 2016-Spring 2017) will focus on research and planning. Georgetown and Washington, DC-area faculty and graduate students who are core participants in the seminar will meet weekly as a reading and planning group to discuss priorities, refine themes, and clarify our individual scholarly connections to the
16 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History volume 45 (2014): 3. [1-18] 17 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010; Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. 18 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2010. 19 “Climate Change: The Storm Ahead.” UNHRC: The UN Refugee Agency (http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e4a5096.html ); “Climate Change Threatens Health,” National Resources Defense Council (http://www.nrdc.org/health/climate/disease.asp ); “Conflict and Resources.” United Nationas (http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/issues/environment/resources.shtml) 20 See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, and Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015.
10 overarching themes discussed in the previous section. The seminar will also set up an official website and blog, with the support of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. (See Section 5 for institutional support.) We will also develop and widely circulate advertisements for our postdoctoral fellow and dissertation fellows at that time. (See Section 6 for specifics.) In addition to continuing to meet as a reading/planning group, we will host our first visitors in late Spring 2017. The occasion will be a public symposium focused on overarching questions for humanistic inquiry in the Anthropocene. Speakers will also meet separately with seminar participants to discuss pre-circulated work-in-progress papers. In academic year 2017-2018, the seminar will shift into “active” mode. We will hold 4 events on campus each semester, each of which is centered on a specific problem, as noted in this proposal. These events will bring a minimum of 4 visitors to campus each semester, more if we can obtain additional funding. The seminar participants will hold a working meeting with each guest to discuss a pre-circulated paper or relevant publication. Since we anticipate significant interest at Georgetown and neighboring universities in the invited speakers, we will also ask many of them to give public lectures or presentations on these topics, either individually or, if we are able to host more than one speaker per topic, in panel or symposium form. Speaker invitations will be distributed as broadly as possible across different disciplines with strong participation from scientists and social scientists as well as humanists. We will also ensure strong diversity of critical perspectives among speakers. On weeks when there is no external speaker, internal participants (faculty, graduate students and the postdoctoral fellow) will circulate work-in-progress papers for discussion. We have attached a list of potential external speakers, some of whom have already expressed their willingness to visit our campus in this context. The seminar will close in May 2018 with a two-day intensive workshop, which will provide an opportunity to integrate discussion of the thematic threads and analytic priorities discussed in the previous section, as well as allowing us to reflect on the insights gained over the two years of the seminar. Final versions of the work-in-progress papers written by core seminar participants will be presented at the workshop. Special attention will be given to work by the dissertation fellows and postdoctoral fellow. Two or three external guests (depending on available funding) will be invited to participate in the workshop as respondents. Section 6. of this proposal contains a partial list of Georgetown and area faculty members we expect to participate in the seminar. They come from a variety of disciplines including English, History, Anthropology, Culture and Politics, Justice and Peace Studies, African American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Also listed are potential participants from Georgetown and area institutions. We also expect graduate student participation from these departments and programs.
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4. Institutional Resources and Suitability
As a traditionally Jesuit university, Georgetown places an especially high value on ethical inquiry and maintains a strong commitment to the pursuit of social justice. The core Jesuit principles of contemplation in action and cura personalis—care of the whole person—offer an affirmative framework that transcends religious doctrines and that, we believe, actively supports the sort of inquiry we hope to pursue in our Sawyer Seminar. As an engaged global university located in Washington, DC, Georgetown attracts leading international scholars, thinkers, artists, and activists whose expertise will enrich the seminar immeasurably.
Georgetown’s academic programs and institutes also offer an especially fertile context for the proposed Sawyer Seminar as we launch a sustained inquiry into the present state and future prospects of the environmental humanities in the Anthropocene. Georgetown is home to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a leading world-wide center for bioethics, with strong participation from theologians, philosophers, biologists and medical experts. Maggie Little, Director of the Kennedy Institute and Professor of Philosophy, has agreed to serve on our Seminar Advisory Committee and will facilitate participation by relevant members of the Institute. In addition, Georgetown is home to the Georgetown Environmental Initiative (GEI), an interdisciplinary body integrating scientific, social-scientific, and policy-based research on environmental concerns. The GEI will ensure that these perspectives are strongly represented in our seminar, although our focus on humanistic inquiry highlights areas of analysis outside the core areas of GEI’s programming and research. Georgetown’s History Department also maintains a PhD focus in Environmental History, founded by one of our seminar Directors, John McNeill, and administered by Professor McNeill along with Dagomar Degroot, one of our core participants. This program will ensure that the seminar has a strong historical focus while involving graduate students and faculty affiliated with the program in broader-based humanities conversations.
Despite these resources, no sustained conversation about the possibilities of interdisciplinary environmental humanities has taken place on the Georgetown campus, nor has the impact of the Anthropocene on our research and teaching been a focus of scholarly discussion. The proposed seminar will inaugurate this conversation in ways that will have a lasting effect on the scholarship and pedagogy of seminar participants and on the intellectual milieu at Georgetown as a whole, as well as potentially generating future cross-institutional collaborations in our area of inquiry. One of our seminar Directors, Dana Luciano, founded a DC-area-wide network of scholars working in LGBT Studies and Queer Theory, which, for nearly a decade, has connected faculty and graduate students at several area universities. We envision a similar network as one possible lasting benefit of the Sawyer Seminar.
Guidance and structural support for the seminar will be provided by: Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, which will help design and maintain our website and blog; Georgetown’s Designing the Future(s) Initiative, which will facilitate global connections and planning; the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the Georgetown Environmental Initiative. We have convened an Advisory Committee of senior University personnel, including Maggie Little, Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Janet Mann, Vice Provost for Research and Professor of Biology and Psychology, and Randall Bass, Vice Provost for Education and Director of the Designing the Future(s) Initiative. This committee will facilitate connections across Georgetown’s many schools and departments, as well as suggest directions for inquiry.
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5. Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellows
In order to recruit top-quality post-doctoral and graduate student fellows for the 2017-2018 academic year, we will advertise the positions widely in late fall 2016 and will constitute a review committee for selection of the fellows. The review committee will be composed of seminar directors and selected participants, advised by the Vice Provost for Research. If applications are received from candidates whose areas of expertise are outside those covered by committee members, we will consult with Georgetown faculty from relevant fields. The postdoctoral fellow selected will have the option of affiliation with a relevant department or center at Georgetown.
Dissertation and postdoctoral fellows will have primary responsibility for maintaining our website and blog, the latter of which will give their writing wide visibility. They will also be involved in organizing visiting speakers, which will help them to develop extensive professional networks.
In addition to the supported fellows, we will encourage active participation by interested Georgetown and DC-area graduate students from across the disciplines.
13 6. Seminar Directors and Participants Title: Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change Seminar Directors: John McNeill, University Professor; Dana Luciano, Associate Professor of English; Nathan K. Hensley, Assistant Professor of English. Confirmed Participants: From Georgetown: Randall Amster, Director, Justice and Peace Studies; Dagomar Degroot, Assistant Professor of Environmental History; Mark Giordano, Director, Program in Science, Technology and International Affairs and Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environment and International Affairs; Shiloh Krupar, Distinguished Associate Professor of Culture and Politics; Mubbashir Rizvi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology; Caroline Wellbery, Professor on the Medical Educator Track, Georgetown University Medical Center. From George Washington University: Jennifer James, Associate Professor and Director, African American Studies. Advisory Committee: Maggie Little, Professor of Philosophy and director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics; Janet Mann, Vice Provost for Research and Professor of Biology and Psychology; Randall Bass, Vice Provost for Education and Director of the Designing the Future(s) Initiative. Potential Participants, Georgetown: Julia Watts Belser, Associate Professor, Jewish Studies/Theology; Francesca Cho, Associate Professor, Theology; Marwa Daoudy, Assistant Professor, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies; Robin Dillon-Merrill, Professor, McDonough School of Business; Catherine Evtuhov, Professor, Department of History; Derek Goldman, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies/Director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics; Leslie Hinkson, Assistant Professor, Sociology; Douglas Howard, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Geosciences, School of Foreign Service; Becky Hsu, Assistant Professor, Sociology; Bette Jacobs, Professor of Health Systems Administration and Distinguished Scholar, O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law; Sarah Stewart Johnson, Assistant Professor, School of Foreign Service; Laurie King, Assistant Professor, Anthropology; Arik Levinson, Professor, Economics; Joanna Lewis, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Service; Meredith McKittrick, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Service; Naomi Mezey, Associate Dean and Professor of Law, Georgetown Law School; Timothy Newfield, Assistant Professor, History; Francis Slakey, Co-Director, Program on Science in the Public Interest; Betsi Stephen, Associate Professor of Demography, School of Foreign Service; Susan Terrio, Professor, Anthropology/French Studies; Alan Tidwell, Director, Center for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies; Norma Tilden, Assistant Professor, Department of English; Diane Yeager, Thomas J. Healey, C'64, Family Distinguished Professor in Ethical Studies, Theology. [LIST IN FORMATION] Potential Participants, Washington, DC Area: Evan Berry, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion, American University; Evre Chambers, Professor, Anthropology, University of Maryland College Park; Jeffrey J. Cohen, Professor, English, George Washington University; Kim Coles, Associate Professor, English, University of Maryland College Park; George Hambrecht, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Maryland College Park; Despina Kakoudaki, Associate Professor and Director, Humanities Lab/Department of Literature, American University; Naveeda Khan, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University; Simon Nicholson, Director, Global Environmental Politics Program, American University; Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, Assistant Professor, English, University of Maryland College Park; Michael Paolissa, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Maryland College Park; David Rain, Director, Environmental Studies Program, American University; Sangeeta Ray, Professor, English, University
14
of Maryland College Park; Kellie Robertson, Associate Professor, English, University of Maryland College Park; Chenyang Xiao, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, American University. [List in formation]
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15aAppendix 1: Budget
Budget Justification 15b
Salaries & Fringe Benefits
Postdoctoral Fellow: $55,000 salary and $12,705 fringe benefits for a postdoctoral fellow for a total of $67,705 in Year 2. The postdoctoral fellow will be recruited in Year 1.
Graduate Students (2): Two dissertation fellowships at an individual rate of $27,000 for a total of $54,000 in Year 2. Each fellow will dedicate 100% effort to the project over the course of the 2017-18 academic year. Fellows will be recruited from eligible doctoral programs in Year 1.
Fringe Benefits: A fringe benefit rate of 23.1% is applied to the postdoctoral fellow, in accordance with the University’s current federally negotiated rate with the DHHS dated January 23, 2015. Graduate students engaged in research during the academic year or summer months are exempt from fringe benefits.
Other Direct Costs
Speakers’ Fees: Five (5) distinguished speakers will participate in seminar proceedings for which each shall be compensated $1,000 as honorarium, with one speaker attending in Year 1 and four in Year 2. Additionally 15 invited speakers will participate for over the course of the project period,delineated as three in Year 1 and 12 in Year 2; each will be compensated $500. Accordingly, a total of $2,500 in Year 1 and $10,000 in Year 2 has been allocated.
Travel - Transportation Roundtrip travel budget for each of 20 invited speakers. International travel is requested for four of speakers (2 England, 1 Scotland, 1 Australia) at a rate of $1,040 per speaker; roundtrip travel from Canada for three speakers (Alberta, Quebec, Ontario) at a rate of $400 per speaker; and 13 roundtrip domestic travel (airfare or train) at an average rate of $400 per speaker. Accordingly, a total of $2,240 is allocated in Year 1 and $8,320 in Year 2.
Travel - Accommodations, Meals: A modest per diem for meals and two nights’ accommodation is allocated for 20 speakers at a rate of $200/day, delineated as 4 and 16 per year, respectively, for totals of $1,600 in Year 1 and $6,400 in Year 2.
Events - Dinners: Nine (9) dinners with invited speakers, each attended by 25 participants at $45 per participant are and delineated as one and eight per year, respectively, for a total of $1,125 in Year 1 and $9,000 in Year 2.
Events - Space, A/V: $165 is allocated for space rental and audiovisual services for each of the nine dinners with invited speakers for totals of $165 in Year 1 and $1,320 in Year 2.
Events - Local Meetings: Additional funding is requested to cover the cost of six reading group meetings in Year 1 and eight work-sharing meetings in Year 2 at a rate of $25 per participant for 25 participants each for a total of $3,750 in Year 1 and $5,000 in Year 2. In aggregate, $18,875 is allocated for the above catered Dinners and Local Meetings across the two-year project period.
Printing and Mailings: For participant reading materials, $75 per packet for 25 participants totals $1,875 in Year 1.
16
Appendix 2: Preliminary Seminar Plan: Proposed Sessions and Speakers
Events listed below will take various forms. When possible, they will be organized as public presentations featuring 1-3 speakers drawn from each of the lists below, followed by work-in-progress symposia to be attended by seminar participants. The final number of speakers will be contingent on additional co-sponsorship funding from Georgetown and other DC-area sources.
Fall 2016
Georgetown and DC-area participants will meet regularly as a reading/planning group, reading selected books and essays in conversation with seminar themes. No visiting speaker events to be held.
Spring 2017
Georgetown and DC-area participants will continue to meet regularly as a reading/planning group. One public event will be held toward the end of this semester: “Human/ities Futures,” which we envision as a public plenary featuring 2-4 visiting speakers, with additional discussions for seminar participants.
1) Human/ities Futures. A frame for the seminar, considering the transdisciplinary purview andnew methodological practices demanded by the Anthropocene.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, University of Chicago. Author of “The Climate of History: Four Theses” and other influential essays on historical method in the Anthropocene.
Stephanie LeMenager, Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor of English and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon. Author of Living Oil: Petroleum in the American Century.
Julie Sze, Director, American Studies Program, University of California-Davis. Author of Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice and Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis.
Jussi Parikka, Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics, University of Southampton. Author of A Geology of Media.
Fall 2017
In Fall 2017 we will organize 4 events, one centered on each of the problems below. Each event will be organized around 1-3 visiting speakers drawn from the speaker lists below. When possible, visiting speakers will give public presentations as well as pre-circulating works-in-progress to discuss with seminar members.
On weeks when we are not hosting visiting speakers, seminar participants will meet to discuss works-in-progress authored by seminar participants.
1) Rethinking the Human. Explores emergent theories (networked agency, assemblage theory,transmateriality) that depart from the conventional notion of the human as bounded, sovereign entity.
Jane Bennett, Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. Author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.
17
Karen Barad, Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness, University of California at Santa Cruz. Author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
Eduardo Kohn, Associate Professor of Anthropology, McGill University. Author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human.
2) Extinction and Life. Situates the recent past, present and future in light of the current extinctionevent; considers processes and effects of extinction and their relation to the valuation of life.
Jan Zalasiewicz, Chair, Anthropocene Working Group and Professor of Paleobiology, University of Leicester. Author of The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?
Neel Ahuja, Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Geography, University of North Carolina. Author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species.
Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University. Author of Extinction: The Death of the Posthuman and Extinction vol. 2: Sex After Life; co-author (with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller) of Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols.
3) Risk and Precarity. Highlights new formulations of risk that come into view as a result of theradically unpredictable nature of climate crisis, along with forms of vulnerability and precarity (such as the emergent category of the “climate refugee”).
Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University. Author of “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (2004), Merchants of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming (co-authored with Erik M. Conway) and other works.
Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor of English and Department Chair, University of California-Santa Barbara. Author of The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics and co-editor (with Bhaskar Sarkar) of Media and Risk, a study of risk, globalization and technoscientific rationality.
Nadine Ehlers, Associate Professor, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney. Author of “Risking "Safety": Breast Cancer, Prognosis, and the Strategic Enterprise of Life” and “The Dialectics of Vulnerability: Breast Cancer and the Body in Prognosis.”
4) Trashing Culture. Explores our notions of “waste” and materiality, encompassing both tangibleand less tangible effects of the current crisis (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; carbon-climate feedback loops), and considers new possibilities for cultural as well as material approaches to the problem of waste.
Stacey Alaimo, Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Texas-Arlington. Author of Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss.
Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender Studies, University of California-Berkeley. Author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect.
Spring 2018
In Spring 2018 we will continue the model established in Fall 2017, alternating 4 events with visiting speakers, centered on each of the problems below, and works-in-progress meetings with seminar participants. In addition, we will host a two-day intensive workshop in May 2018, where seminar participants will present final versions of the works discussed over the course of the seminar.
18
1) Aesthetics, Representation and Justice. Develops frameworks (such as “slow violence”) thathelp make environmental harm dispersed over long durations and diffuse spaces visible; questions the most effective and accurate ways of representing climate change and other effects too large to be seen.
Ricardo Dominguez, Associate Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego. Founder of Electronic Disturbance Theater.
Janet Fiskio, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College. “Apocalypse and Ecotopia: Narratives in Global Climate Change Discourse,” and “Where Food Grows on Water: Food Sovereignty and North American Indigenous Literatures.”
Marina Zurkow, media artist creating work on topics such as invasive species, Superfund sites, and petroleum interdependence.
Rob Nixon, Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment, Princeton Environmental Institute. Author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
2) Interspecies Relations. Rethinks human/animal/plant relations in light of increasedvulnerability and ongoing transformation of biosystems.
Anna Tsing, Professor, Anthropology and Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. Convenor, Matsutake Worlds Research Group; author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection.
Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Assistant Professor of English, George Mason University. Author of “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism.”
Claire Jean Kim, Professor of Political Science and Professor of Asian American Studies, University of California-Irvine. Author of Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age.
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture, York University. Co-editor of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire.
3) Sustainability: Cultures. Gives both located and global attention to the erosion of cultures andlife-worlds in the light of climate crisis, including the displacement of affected populations, conquest of indigenous lands past and present, and intercultural conflicts exacerbated by environmental pressures.
Gerald Torres, Jane M. G. Forster Professor of Law, Cornell University. Former deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice; co-author of The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy.
Marisol de la Cadena, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis. Author of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds.
Modupe Olaugon, Associate Professor of English, York University. Artistic director of AfriCan Theatre Ensemble, scholar of literatures of African migration.
Anand Pandian, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University. Author of Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation.
4) Sustainability: Institutions. Inquiries into the kinds of short- and long-range transformationneeded to sustain institutions, with particular attention to higher education. Encompasses both pragmatic questions (“green” campuses, funding for education) and speculative (disciplinary transformation).
Ying Hua, Associate Professor of Design and Environmental Analysis, Cornell University, working on sustainable building design in China, Japan and New York City.
19 David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, Oberlin
College. Author of Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World and other works; director of The Oberlin Project to create a fully climate-sustainable city.
Jedediah Purdy, Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law, Duke University. Author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene.
5) Respondents for Closing Symposium, May 2018 Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness Department and
Feminist Studies Department, University of California-Santa Cruz. Author of The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” and other works.
Katherine Yusoff. Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, St. Mary’s University of London. Author of “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene,” “Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of Becoming Inhuman,” and other works.
Ursula Heise, Professor of English, Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global and Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species.
20 Appendix 3: Seminar Directors’ CVs
Dana Luciano Department of English, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057-1131
[email protected] danaluciano.com
Education 1999 Ph.D. English, Cornell University. Major Subject: American Literature. Minor
Subjects: Women's Studies; LGBT Studies. 1996 M.A. in English, Cornell University. 1989 A. B. in Modern Literature and Society (Honors) and International Relations (magna
cum laude), Brown University, Employment Associate Professor, Department of English, Georgetown University, 2008-present. Director, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Georgetown University, 2009-2012. Assistant Professor, Department of English, Georgetown University, 2004-2008. Assistant Professor, Department of English, Hamilton College, 2000-2004. Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Holy Cross College, 1999-2000. Recent Awards and Fellowships David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Fellowship, Cornell University Society for the
Humanities, 2014-15. Senior Fellowship, Georgetown University, spring 2015. NEH Residential Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2012-13. NEH Residential Fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia, fall 2012 (declined). Crompton-Noll Award for best essay in lesbian/gay studies, 2012. Teaching, Learning and Technology Fellowship, Georgetown University, 2011-12. Distinguished Achievement in Research Award, Georgetown University, 2009. Modern Languages Association Prize for a First Book, 2008. Honorable mention, Crompton-Noll Award for best essay in lesbian/gay studies, 2007. Recent Publications Monographs: Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. New York University Press
(Sexual Cultures series), 2007. Winner of the Modern Language Association’s Prize for a First Book, December 2008.
How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth Century U.S. In progress. Time and Again: The Affective Circuits of Spirit Photography. In progress. Edited collections and journal issues: “Queer Inhumanisms.” Special double issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, co-edited
with Mel Y. Chen. Vol. 22 nos. 2-3, spring/summer 2015. Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. Essay collection, co-edited with Ivy G.
Wilson, NYU Press, 2014. Social Text Periscope dossier on Cruel Optimism and conversation with author Lauren Berlant, 2013.
http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/cruel-optimism/ Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” Broadview Press Cultural Editions. In progress. Essays, articles and book chapters:
21 “Rock,” in Speaking Substances: Media for the Anthropocene forum, Los Angeles Review of Books,
March 28, 2016. “Touching Seeing,” American Literary History 28:1, spring 2016. “How the Earth Feels: Interview.“ Transatlantica: Revue d’études américaines, Special issue on Deep
Time. Winter 2015. “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” (co-authored with Mel Y. Chen), introduction to “Queer
Inhumanisms.” Special double issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen. 22:2-3, spring/summer 2015.
“Tracking Prehistory.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, forum on monstrosity, ed. John Lardas Modern. Spring 2015.
"The Inhuman Anthropocene," Avidly, March 22, 2015 http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2015/03/22/the-inhuman-anthropocene/
“Sacred Theories of Earth: Matters of Spirit in William and Elizabeth Denton’s The Soul of Things.” American Literature 86:4, special issue, “After the Post-Secular.” December 2014.
"Introduction: On Moving Ground," in Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson (NYU Press, 2014).
“Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come: Velvet Goldmine’s Queer Archive,” in E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, eds., Queer Times, Queer Becomings (SUNY Press, 2011). Winner, Crompton-Noll Award, 2012.
“Geological Fantasies, Haunting Anachronies: Eros, Time, and History in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods,’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55:3-4, Special Issue, “Come Again?” December 2009.
Recent Talks, Presentations and Seminars “Beyond Thoreau: Re-Imagining Environmental Pedagogy.” Co-convenor (with Jennifer James,
George Washington University). C19: The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, March 19. 2016.
“Love and Death in the Anthropocene: Geologic Time, Genre, Moby-Dick,” Keynote, Personhood conference, Queens College Department of English, December 3, 2015; Local Americanists Speaker Series, University of Maryland Department of English, December 1, 2015; Keynote, Climate Literacies Symposium, Oakland University, October 15, 2015.
“Queer Feminist Matters,” Conversation with Ann Cvetkovich, LGBT Studies, Cornell University, April 22, 2015.
“What the Earth Remembers,” Contested Global Landscapes Project Conference, Institute for the Social Sciences, Cornell University, April 9, 2015.
“Romancing the Trace: Edward Hitchcock's Speculative Ichnology,” Department of English, Johns Hopkins University, March 26, 2015; Society for the Humanities/Atkinson Center Annual Lecture on Sustainable Futures, Cornell University, March 2nd, 2015; SUNY Albany, Department of English, February 25, 2015.
“Geo-Testimonial in the Anthropocene,” New Matters and Queer Life Symposium, Yale University, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, January 30, 2015.
22
John R. McNeill History Department, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057-1035
[email protected] 1. Education Ph.D. 1981 Duke University M.A. 1977 Duke University B.A. 1975 Swarthmore College 2. Professional Employment 2006- University Professor, Georgetown University 2003-06 Cinco Hermanos Chair of Environment and International Affairs, Georgetown 1993- Professor, School of Foreign Service and History Dept., Georgetown 1990-93 Associate Professor of history, Georgetown University 1985-90 Assistant Professor, intersocietal and African history, Georgetown 1983-85 Assistant Professor, European history, Goucher College 1981-83 Instructor and Visiting Assistant Professor, Duke University 1982-83 Researcher, Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory 1975-76 Instructor in Geography and Economics, Athens College (Athens, Greece) VISITING APPOINTMENTS 2015 University of Oslo 2010 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) 2000 University of Canterbury (New Zealand) 1992-93 University of Otago (New Zealand) 3. Publications BOOKS: 2016 The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) [with Peter Engelke], 275pp 2010 Mosquito Empires: Ecology and Warfare in the Greater Caribbean, 1620- 1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 371pp 2003 The Human Web (New York: Norton), 350pp [co-authored with W.H.
McNeill] 2000 Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th
century World (New York: Norton [London: Penguin, 2001]), 421pp
1992 The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press), 423pp [paperback 2003]
1985 The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press), 329pp
EDITED BOOKS (Selected): 2015 Cambridge World History. Vol. 7. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750 – Present.
Part 1: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). [co-edited with Ken Pomeranz]
23 2015 Cambridge World History. Vol. 7. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750 – Present.
Part 2: Shared Transformations? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). [co-edited with Ken Pomeranz]
2012 Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge) [co-edited with Alan Roe] 2012 A Companion to Global Environmental History (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell) [co-edited with Erin Stewart Mauldin] 2010 Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press) [co-edited with Corinna Unger] 2010 Environmental History As If Nature Existed (New Delhi: Oxford University Press) [co-edited with José Augusto Padua and Mahesh Rangarajan] 2007 Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (Lanham: AltaMira Press) [co-edited with Alf Hornborg and Joan Martinez Alier] 2003 Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (New York: Routledge) 3 vols. [co-edited
with Sheperd Krech and Carolyn Merchant] ARTICLES, CHAPTERS, ESSAYS (Selected): 2016 “The Anthropocene and the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 49, no. 2
(2016), 117–28 2016 “The Anthropocene is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the
Holocene,” Science 351, no 6269 (8 January 2016), 137. [co-authored with the Anthropocene Working Group]; 10pp version at http://dx.doi. org/10.1126/ science.aad2622
2015 “Epoch: Disputed Start Dates for the Anthropocene,” Nature 520 (23 April), 436 [co-authored with the Anthropocene Working Group]
2015 “Energy, Population, and Environmental Change since 1750: Entering the Anthropocene.” in: J.R. McNeill and Ken Pomeranz, eds., Cambridge World History. Vol. 7. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750 – Present. Part 1: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 51-82.
24
N A T H A N K . H E N S L E Y [email protected]
202.687.5297 (o) / 646.528.6563 (c)
ACA DE MIC A PPOI NTM E NTS
Georgetown University Assistant Professor of English, 2012-Present
Georgetown University Visiting Assistant Professor of English, 2011-2012
Macalester College Assistant Professor of English, 2010-2012 (On leave, 2011-2012) Duke University
Postdoctoral Fellow in English & Assistant Editor, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2009-2010
E D UCATI O N
Duke University, Ph.D, English, 2009 University of Notre Dame, M.A., English, 2004, with distinction Vassar College, B.A., English, 1999, with honors
R ES EARC H / PUBLI CATI O NS
Book: “Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press, forthcoming 2016. Edited Collection: “Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire.” Coedited with Philip Steer (Massey University, NZ). 80,000 words. In development; proposal under consideration. Edited Special Issue: The Andrew Lang Effect: Network, Discipline, Method. Spec. issue of RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (2013, pub date 2014). Articles: “Soot Moth: Biston Betularia and the Victorian End of Nature.” BRANCH: Britain,
Representation, and the Nineteenth Century. In progress, forthcoming. (Peer reviewed) “Unquiet Slumbers.” Solicited by Victorian Studies for special issue devoted in part to
V21 Plenary Panel, “Strategic Presentism.” (Under submission, peer reviewed.) “After Death: Christina Rossetti’s Timescales of Catastrophe.” Nineteenth Century
Contexts 38.5 (December 2016). Forthcoming. (Peer reviewed) “Database and the Future Anterior: Reading The Mill on the Floss Backwards.” Genre
50.1 (2017) Special issue, “Narrative Against Data,” Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal, eds.) Forthcoming. (Peer Reviewed)
“Network: Andrew Lang and the Distributed Agencies of Literary Production.” Victorian Periodicals Review 48.3 (Fall 2015 (Special issue, “A Return to Theory,” Matthew Philpotts, ed.): 359-382 (Peer reviewed)
“Empire.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Dino F. Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, eds. London: Blackwell, 2015. (Peer reviewed)
“What is a Network (and Who is Andrew Lang)?” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (2013, pub. date spring 2014). Special issue on “The Andrew Lang Effect: Network, Discipline, Method.” Edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Molly Clark Hillard. 5,000 words. (Peer reviewed)
“Curatorial Reading and Endless War.” Victorian Studies 56.1 (Fall 2013, pub. date spring 2014): 59-83. (Peer reviewed)
“Allegories of the Contemporary.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45.2. (Special issue on contemporary fiction, Summer 2012): 276-300. (Peer reviewed)
25 “Armadale and the Logic of Liberalism.” Victorian Studies 51.4 (2009): 607-632. (Peer
reviewed) “Mister Trollope, Lady Credit, and the Way We Live Now.” In The Politics of Gender in
Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century. Regenia Gagnier, Margaret Markwick, and Deborah Morse, eds. London: Ashgate, 2009: 147-160. (Peer reviewed)
Review Essays: “Figures of Reading.” On Garrett Stewart’s Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian
Fiction. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 54.2 (Spring 2012): 329-342. “Punishing Disciplines.” On Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, eds., Disciplinarity at
the Fin de Siècle. minnesota review 58-60 (2003): 311-316.
Selected Book Reviews & Articles in the Public Sphere: Review of The Oxford Handbook to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Michael O’Neil and Anthony Howe,
eds. Notes and Queries (forthcoming, 1,050 words). “In this Dawn to be Alive: Versions of the ‘Postcritical,’ 1999, 2015.” Essay for colloquium, “We,
Reading, Now,” at the Stanford Arcade. (2,500 words): http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/dawn-be-alive-versions-“postcritical”-1999-2015 (Peer reviewed)
“Caine Prize Material.” Essay commissioned by the Caine Prize for African Writing, July 5, 2013. (1,100 words): http://caineprize.blogspot.com/2013/07/caine-prize-material-by-nathan- hensley.html
Selected Invited Talks and Appearances: “Towards a Strategic Presentism.” Invited presentation for keynote roundtable.
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association (INCS), Asheville, NC, 2016 (upcoming).
“Empire and Unfielding.” Invited roundtable presentation. V21 Symposium. University of Chicago. October 9, 2015.
“Nature Poetry After Nature.” Invited Lecture. Marymount University English Department. September 25, 2015. “Sovereignty and Form in Victorian Modernity: Swinburne / Drone Art.” Annual C19
Lecture (invited), Duquesne University. April 22, 2015. “‘Useless as Evidence’: Mediation and Asymmetrical War, 1857, 2014.” Invited lecture. “New
Directions in Empire Studies,” Rutgers British Studies Center. Rutgers University. December 5, 2014. “Curatorial Reading and Endless War.” Funded participant in seminar on “Post-critical Interpretation” sponsored by New Literary History. University of Virginia, October
31-November 1, 2014.
Selected Conference Presentations & Lectures:
“After Death: Christina Rossetti’s Timescales of Catastrophe.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association (INCS), Asheville, NC, 2016.
“Tragic Ecologies: Marx with Hopkins.” Panel on “Vulgar Marxism,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association (INCS), Atlanta, GA. 2015.