This seminar will not involve lectures or presentations, but rather discussion of pre-circulated essays by our featured participants.

Stacy Alaimo (English, University of Texas at Arlington) is the author of Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana, 2010), which won the ASLE Award for Ecocriticism in 2011. In it, Alaimo argues that “trans-corporeality” is crucial for environmental theories, ethics, and political movements. Her first book, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell, 2000), investigates how North American women writers, theorists, and activists from the early 19th century to the late 20th century transformed the troublesome conceptions of nature for feminist, and sometimes environmentalist, ends. With Susan J. Hekman, Alaimo co-edited Material Feminisms (Indiana 2008), which brings together an exciting range of new materialist theories. She is currently writing a book entitled Sea Creatures and the Limits of Animal Studies: Science, Aesthetics, Ethics.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey (English, UCLA) is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (U of Hawai’i Press, 2007). With George Handley, she co-edited Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford, 2011) and, with George Handley and Renée Gosson, she co-edited Caribbean Literature and the Environment (U of Virginia Press, 2005). With Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan, she has most recently co-edited Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (forthcoming from Routledge in 2015). In 2012-2013 she coordinated the Global Ecologies: Nature/Narrative/Neoliberalism Conference at UCLA, a workshop on Pacific Island militarization at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, and a workshop on Imperialism, Narrative and the Environment at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. She is currently completing a manuscript about climate change and empire in literature and the visual arts.

Thom van Dooren (Philosophy, University of New South Wales) is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014), each chapter of which focuses on a different species or group of birds and traces the wide-ranging ramifications of modern-day extinctions. His current work focuses primarily on the philosophical and ethical dimensions of species extinctions and draws the humanities into conversation with ecology, biology, ethology, and ethnographic work with communities whose lives are entangled with disappearing species in a range of different ways. Van Dooren is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and a Visiting Fellow in the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is also co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities.