Climate Fictions Before Climate Change
Description
This seminar seeks to explore what we can learn about climate fiction and about literature’s role in understanding and addressing climate change when we look at literary texts written before climate change became a solidified discursive formation. Any discussion of climate presupposes a stable definition of the term within the scientific contexts that give it meaning, but the history of human activities that lead to human made climate change generally predates these discourses. Comparative work in the Environmental Humanities complicates dominant ideas about climate and interrogate the field’s tendency to focus on contemporary climate fiction. Therefore, the seminar is interested in historical (and regional) counterpoints: climate fictions “before” climate change.
The seminar operates under a broad definition of the term “fictions,” considering literary and non-literary texts of all genres. As such, it will also offer opportunities to think about the different affordances of different genres in rendering ideas about the climate and climate change.
How do our questions about climate and climate change change when we consider the long history of human entanglement with the climate? What specific role can literature play for such inquiries? What do we miss when we fail to consider the history of climate fictions?
Contributions to the seminar could consist of specific case studies of such “climate fictions” or of comparative interrogations of alternative literary formations of climate “before climate change.”
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Patrick Durdel is a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. He completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Lausanne in 2025. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
Speaker Bio
David Gould is a Ph.D candidate in Germanic Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is writing a dissertation about the knowledge of the atmosphere in modern German literature and the transformation of aesthetics in the passage from nature to climate.
Speaker Bio
Charlotte E. Jones is an independent scholar based in London. She completed her PhD on subversive forms in eighteenth-century literature at KCL in 2024.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Isabell A. Meske is a literary scholar and teacher in Hannover. Her dissertation examines home, displacement, and trauma in Kotzebue’s Die Negersklaven (1794). She is developing a habilitation project on labour narratives and a further strand on ecocritical perspectives of the nineteenth-century canon. She has published widely and presented at conferences in the United States, Germany, Poland, Luxembourg, France, Portugal, and Ireland.
Speaker Bio
Benjamin Sauvé started his studies with a Bachelor in German Studies at the University of Montreal in 2011. In 2012, he studied abroad in Heidelberg, Germany, where he chose to focus his research on the transition between Romanticism and Realism. In 2015, he started his Masters at the University of Montreal. He worked on the author Arno Schmidt and his work Die Schule der Atheisten. In 2017, he started his PhD at McGill, under the direction of Prof. Tove Holmes.
Speaker Bio
Ilse Meiler is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has previously worked as microbiologist and taught high school French in her home state of Colorado. Ilse is an active translator and community interpreter. Her research interests span the environmental humanities, decolonial studies, and translation studies. In addition to English, she speaks French, Spanish, Russian, German, and Ukrainian.