Documenting Damage: Zones of Human and Environmental Violence
Description
Survivors of armed conflicts and environmental disasters alike experience an imperative to document the damages visited upon their communities through testimonial literature, visual culture, and other modes of creative expression. Their voices bear witness to the discrepant impacts of human and environmental violence on populations marginalized by histories of colonization, racialization, migration, and geographic division, asserting their right to narrate their own histories. Meanwhile, dominant media portrayals often downplay the agency of survivors, perpetuating collective amnesia about their perspectives.
This seminar focuses on the intersection of ecocatastrophe and warfare to examine how survivors of disaster document its unequal consequences for human and more-than-human life. How have writers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, scholars, and activists mobilized their tools of expression to record the sometimes spectacular, sometimes invisible effects of environmental violence and armed conflict? Which elements do they tend to privilege, and which are subject to erasure? What are the ethics of documenting populations and environments reeling from catastrophe, those in the process of damage, or those to be harmed in the future? How can we represent damage without insisting upon recovery, and how might documentation, broadly understood, facilitate the work of mourning?
We invite submissions analyzing the capacities and limitations of creative media (literature, visual arts, theory, film, etc.) to document the past, present, and future of human and environmental violence.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Laurence Butet-Roch, a post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, probes the entanglements of the politics of visibility, representational justice and petroculture. This expands her doctoral work (York University, Environmental Studies) on toxic visualities and counter-visualities which was awarded the Governor General Gold Medal. Her research draws on her decade-long professional experience as a photographer, photo editor, curator and writer.
Speaker Bio
Pierre-Elliot Caswell is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His work examines the evolution of France’s treatment of race and colonialism in French laws and discourses since the 19th century; the intellectual, literary, and artistic responses that such discourses have provoked in the present; as well as the material, discursive, and historical intimacies between colonialism, modernity, and environmental racism.
Speaker Bio
Liliane Ehrhart (Ph.D., Princeton University) is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of literary studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She is currently working on a new book project on the representation of fire in art and literature. She recently co-organized a study day, "Le feu, matière de l'écriture" (Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture au Québec).
Speaker Bio
Dr. Shabana Sayeed (she/her) is a lecturer at Bentley University in the Department of English and Media Studies. She earned her doctoral in Literary Studies from Georgia State University. Her research focuses on postcolonial trauma literature and history, especially Indian Dalit and Pan-African women, refugee women in media, and ethnic, religious, and cultural representations in transnational digital pedagogy and AI. Her teaching emphasizes ESL and non-native speakers.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Hannah Rachel Cole is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is co-PI of the More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory. She is currently at work on a book about plant life in Caribbean literature.
Speaker Bio
Handuo Sun (he/him) is a senior at Swarthmore College, PA, majoring in honors Classical Greek and minoring in honors Comparative Literature. Handuo's research interest lies in the comparative study of lament, oral literature, and fabular traditions, with an emphasis on the representation of karuṇarasa in Classical Sanskrit literature; grief in Greek tragedies and Homeric epics; and classical reception, especially German interpretation, of emotions in Greek and Sanskrit literary traditions.
Speaker Bio
Tiffany Sidders is a Literature Ph.D. student with a Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights certification at UT-Dallas. Her research focuses on the genocidal pattern of female perpetration, gendered silences, and censorships within different modes of storytelling. Her current publications revolve around the layers of trauma in Gisella Perl’s I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz and trauma and motherhood in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
Speaker Bio
Rume Kpadamrophe is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include memory studies, trauma theory, and postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on African and Caribbean literatures. His work brings together Francophone and Anglophone traditions to explore how literature responds to historical trauma, reimagines sites of memory, and negotiates global belonging.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Paulo Andreas Lorca holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Cornell University. He specializes in nineteenth-century Latin American narrative, visual theory, the history of photography in the region, and text-and-image studies. He has been an HSP Scholar at Cornell's Society of the Humanities and currently works at the University of Notre Dame. Additionally, he contributes essays and reviews to Revista Otra Parte and other popular outlets.