Forest Stories
Description
Like stories themselves, forests have little respect for geopolitical boundaries. And like forests, stories have always played a crucial role in human imaginations around the world. The wide distribution of forests across most of the planet's biospheres suggests that stories about forests, as well as the stories that forests tell, should be understood in relation to literary and theoretical encounters both with plants and with the planet. While discourse on climate change focuses on deforestation and reforestation in relation to the problem of dangerously increased carbon dioxide levels, trees and forests are treated in large part instrumentally rather than as agents in their own right. But literary treatments of trees and forests imagine different kinds of stories, in which not only humans, but trees and forests, can be characters in a narrative with their own agency. As Richard Powers writes in The Overstory, “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
This seminar invites reflection on the forest/story nexus throughout literary and cultural history, particularly in relation to the growing understanding that plants, trees, and forests have their own stories to tell. Because of the wide distribution of forests across most of the planet's biospheres, we especially welcome proposals that consider these questions in non-Anglophone, transnational, or comparative settings.
Some topics that might be considered:
-what is the temporality of the forest, especially in contrast to human or social timeframes?
-who are the humans and nonhumans that inhabit forests? How and why?
-how do forests experience disturbance or crisis—whether climatic or otherwise?
-how does a cultural geography that begins with forests differ (if it does) from a socio-cultural one?
-what, from a literary or narrative point of view, is vital about forests, and what from an arboreal point of view, is vital about stories?
-what promises of futures or the lack thereof do forests make?
In addressing these and other related questions, papers might draw on any of a number of theoretical frameworks. Approaches drawing on the political economy of woodlands might be as insightful as those focused on eco-phenomenology, queer ecology, new materialisms, tropology, or literary history.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Heather Hicks is a professor of English at Villanova University. She is author of The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage (2016) and The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative (2008). Her recent publications look at apocalyptic and/or climate fiction, exploring themes including disaster-response, extinction, vulnerability, the myth of the femme-fatale, and the intersection of the domestic and apocalyptic genres.
Speaker Bio
Bidisha Nandi is a prospective PhD student in the department of English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, set to join in January 2026. Her research focuses on the theme of apocalypse in the context of a posthuman world, particularly through the works of Stephen King and Jeff VanderMeer. She holds a master’s degree in English Literature from Banaras Hindu University, India. Her research interests include posthumanism, environmental humanities, new materialism, and speculative fiction.
Speaker Bio
Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University as a Fulbright Fellow and was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Sabancı University. She specializes in cultural trauma, memory studies, postcolonial theory, ecofeminism, and Anglophone literature, and is completing her monograph Slow Trauma and Environment in Anglophone World Literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Erin Obodiac received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine and has held appointments at UC Irvine, the University of Leeds, Cornell University, and is currently teaching at SUNY Albany. Her writings assemble residual questions from the deconstructive “legacy” with emergent discourses on technics and animality, media ecology, and machinic subjectivity.
Speaker Bio
Epp Annus is associate professor at Tallinn University (Estonia); she also lectures at Ohio State University (USA). Recent books include Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990 (Cambridge UP, 2025); Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands; an edited volume Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures under Soviet Rule, and several books in Estonian. She has published two novels, some poetry and several children’s books.
Speaker Bio
Pujita Guha is an artist, curator, and Mahindra Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Her current book project, Forested Media: Indigenous Lifeworlds in Upland Asia, looks at how, in the post-Cold War era (1990s-present), Indigenous communities in the region claim the sovereignty of forests through artistic, popular, and scientific media. She has published in Cultural Critique, Cultural Politics, E-flux, Artforum, among other edited volumes, artistic projects, and exhibition catalogs.
Speaker Bio
Sarah Bird is a multimedia artist-researcher & PhD candidate in Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, focusing on ethical arboreal-human relationality. Fellow of UCSC's Climate Action Lab, 2024 Visiting Artist-Scholar at Justus Liebig University (Giessen) Bird created Being/Tree, projecting a true-scale California coast redwood in light on San Francisco's Ferry Building in 2024. Bird's work was featured at the 2016 Venice Biennale and is the subject of Giants Rising (2024).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Marco Caracciolo is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. He is the author of several books, including most recently Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality (De Gruyter, 2023). He received the Barbara and George Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative for his 2022 book Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (University of Nebraska Press).
Speaker Bio
Sean Grattan is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Quincy University. He is the author of Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (University of Iowa Press, 2017). He is currently working on two monograph projects: Aesthetics of the Fucked and Queer Commons: Sociality, Affect, and World-Building.
Speaker Bio
Franny Nudelman is Professor in the English Department at Carleton University. Her scholarship explores cultural responses to war and war resistance. She is the author of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War and co-editor of Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture After 1945. Most recently, she published Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military (Verso Books, 2019), and her writing on sleep has appeared in Literary Hub and BBC Science Focus.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Karl Dahlquist, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Head of the Division of Urban Planning and Development and Director of the Art Foundation, at University West, Sweden. Has published in the fields of modern political theory, philosophy of education, sustainable economics, and forestry. His "Leo Strauss on Hobbes" book is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Speaker Bio
Emma Knickelbine is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her interests lie with the arboreal humanities, and she is deeply fascinated with how trees affect our thinking, our writing, and our being in the world. She has held positions at UWM and several nonprofit organizations, nature centers, and museums, and through it all, has noticed the all-encompassing presence of trees in our imaginations and our material lives.
Speaker Bio
Caren Irr is Kevy an Hortense Kaiserman Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University. She is the author or editor of eight volumes, most recently Environmental Futures: An International Literary Anthology (2024).