1. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF
LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT (EASLCE)
"Environmental Change - Cultural Change"
University of Bath, 1-4 September, 2010
This international conference is organised on behalf of EASLCE and ASLE-UK, the European and British affiliates of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, by the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages and the Institute for Sustainable Energy and Environment (I-SEE) at the University of Bath, with support from Bath Spa University and the English Subject Centre of the UK Higher Education Academy. The sponsorship of the Taylor & Francis Group and Cambridge University Press is gratefully acknowledged.
The provisional programme and registration forms can be found on the conference website at http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/conferences/e-c-c-c/.
Keynote addresses:
Prof Sidney Dobrin (University of Florida, Dept of English): "Toward Complex Environmental Visual Literacies"
Dr Georgina Endfield (University of Nottingham, Dept of Geography: "Climate Collapse Narratives in Critical Perspective"
Prof Robert Watson (UCLA, Dept of English): "Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and the Ecology of the Self"
Strands throughout the conference will be devoted to:
- climate change: representation and discourse
- dystopias and science fiction
- food and animals in shifting perspective
- ecocinecriticism
- environmental change in history, art and activism
- ecopoetry
- ecopedagogy
- postcolonial and indigenous literatures
- writing nature in a changing environment
- environmental justice
Individual panels include:
- unbalanced nature
- foreign languages, education and the environment
- theorising ecocriticism: 2010 and beyond
- imagined environments: problem areas, dream worlds and dystopia
- walk the book: creating an environmental consciousness through literary tourism
2. Second EASLCE conference (report)
EASLCE’s second biennial conference took place in Klagenfurt from April 28 to May 1, 2006. The theme was ‘Water: Literary, Cultural and Environmental Perspectives’. The conference, which was organised by Maureen Devine, with the support of the Department of English and American Studies at the Alps-Adriatic University of Klagenfurt, was a lively and interesting gathering. There were 5 plenary speakers. The environmental sociologist Thomas Kluge (Institute for Social-Ecological Development, Frankfurt) opened the conference by speaking (in German) on attitudes towards water in historical perspective, and the continuing challenges posed by the need to meet the clean and waste water needs of cities. Vera Norwood (University of New Mexico) gave a thought-provoking lecture on fictional accounts of hurricanes and their consequences by 20th-century American women writers, exploring the gender dimension of so-called ‘natural’ catastrophes. The British novelist Maggie Gee and the Dublin poet Rosemarie Rowley read from their work, and Brian Clarke, fishing correspondent and environmental columnist for The Times, spoke about and read from his acclaimed novel The Stream.
The conference was attended by over 70 delegates, who came mainly from Europe, but also from the USA, Canada, Australia, India, Japan and South Africa. It was good to see news of EASLCE spreading beyond the previous ‘core’ countries Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain to Spain and Italy, France and Belgium. The Eastern European countries were also better represented at this conference than two years ago in Münster, with delegates from Russia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Greece and Turkey, as well as Estonia and Lithuania. The papers in the workshops addressed a wide range of themes related to the cultural, social, political and environmental significance of water, with literature (from a range of countries as well as the USA) playing a prominent part. Among the most enjoyable aspects of the conference were a magical performance of music on the glass harp, and the Slovenian Andrej Zdravic’s fascinating eco-documentary filmRiverglass.
EASLCE would like to express its thanks to Maureen for all the hard work she put into hosting this conference, and to all our sponsors, especially the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Klagenfurt, the US Embassy in Vienna and the British Council, and, last but not least, ASLE, who generously enabled travel subsidies to be granted to a number of delegates.
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