Non-Human Archives: (Hi)stories and How We Tell Them
Description
This seminar places renewed critical interest in “the archive” in dialogue with the “non-human turn” in ecocriticism. Work on the non-human and/or posthuman in literary and cultural studies (Haraway 2003; Tsing 2014; Morton 2013 et al.) offers avenues for thinking agency, personhood, and subjecthood alongside other-than-human (and not always living) entities. Archives, which both rely and center upon humans, may seem like an unlikely place to seek out the nonhuman. We suggest, however, that the nonhuman is central to the archive, materially and practically. Scientific archives in particular attest to the importance of evolving systems of land tenure, management and use, and the centrality of fauna and flora to national, imperial, and global histories.
What’s more, if, as Bruno Latour (2014) has argued, a crucial precursor to a “deanimated”, scientific vision of the world-as-object was its animation through cultural ideas with which humans endowed the nonhuman world with meaning, it follows that attention to the process of archiving reveals the vital, cultural, literary roots behind “scientific” conceptions of the nonhuman world. In other words, literary and cultural ideas about nonhuman entities—whether crops, geographical spaces, or animals—regularly underpin and inform “factual” (and therefore more conventionally archival) knowledge.
We welcome contributions that explore how conceptions of the nonhuman in literary and cultural studies—and the critical frameworks that support them—can inform new approaches to the archive by redirecting attention away from the human toward the various “others” that have “made history” if not also, the modern world. On the one hand, we are interested in how theories of the non-human offer new avenues for inquiry and theoretical approaches toward formal archives. How, for example, might an archive be assembled around a non-human subject? Can the nonhuman archive assume alternative/innovative forms (i.e., considering a seed bank or a plot of land as an archive in the same way we may approach a literary archive)? Is the archive itself a site of non-human agency? On the other hand, we are interested in the ways that forms of cultural production including literature, film, and other media might already operate as an archive of the nonhuman. Could the writer or literary comparatist’s ability to gather disparate sources related to a given place, crop, or natural element entail the formation of an archive that itself reveals patterns of non-human agency and subjecthood across different mediums, language literatures, and cultures? We hope to answer these and other questions in a multidisciplinary conversation that welcomes contributions from other field scholars and creative practitioners.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Kari Weil is University Professor of Letters, College of the Environment and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author most recently of Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and numerous essays related to the field of animal studies (within the arts and humanities).
Speaker Bio
Abigail Fields is the Hall Family Foundation Assistant Professor of French at the University of Kansas. Their work is interested in the representation of environment(s) in popular media. Their current book project uses agriculture as a lens to reconsider narrative theory, particularly with regard to literary setting. They are also working on a research-creation project that uses quilting and archival methodologies to explore multi-media storytelling about land.
Speaker Bio
Jake Spertus is a statistician who has published on soil measurement, post-election audits, transportation planning, clinical trials in psychiatry and cardiology, and the history of statistics in science, governance, and agriculture. They grew up in Missouri and received their PhD from UC Berkeley. They write poetry and make music incorporating elements from the land. They now live in Montreal, where they are working on methods for quantitative research in public health and agriculture.
Speaker Bio
Emily Mulvaney (she/her) is a research-based sculptor from Minnesota. She received her BFA from NDSU in 2019 and her MFA in Sculpture from UMT in 2024. She was the 2024-2025 Lance Williams Art and Science Artist-in-Residence and Lecturer at the University of Kansas. Mulvaney has exhibited nationally and has work in private and public collections, including the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. She will be an Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center in February 2026.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr Katy Brundan is a senior instructor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. She has published on translation and philology in the context of nineteenth-century fiction. Her book The Translational Imagination: A Multilingual Approach to the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is at the submission stage.
Speaker Bio
Kayla is a lecturer and PhD candidate in eighteenth-century British literature at the University at Albany. She teaches courses in the Environmental Humanities such as "The Posthuman and the Short Story," "The Ecological Dystopia," "Nature Writing in the Anthropocene," "The Gothic Anthropocene," and "Animals in Children's Literature." Her dissertation is titled “Horse Racing and Biopolitics in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century.”
Speaker Bio
Genevieve Creedon is a scholar and poet whose research examines the functions of metaphoric structures in the public sphere. She is a comparatist by training and currently directs the Scholarly Writing Program at Indiana University.
Speaker Bio
Pierre Forfert is a PhD Candidate in French at Yale. His dissertation, “Faux Ecologies: Manufacturing Plants in 19th-century France,” investigates how representations of artificial plants reshaped literary and cultural debates about authenticity, industry, and the environment in 19th-century France. He was named Stacy Lloyd Fellow in garden studies at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation for Spring 2026. He has published in Research in African Literatures, the Balzac Review, and French Forum.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nicole Emanuel is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She studies literary, visual, and sonic representations of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Her research uses an ecocritical approach to investigate histories of polar exploration from a multispecies perspective.
Speaker Bio
Amber Bal is a Collegiate Fellow in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her research explores the representation of rural spaces in African literature and archival documents written in French and Wolof. She has a particular interest in how different forms of agrarian change are thematized within literature.
Speaker Bio
Irene Rihuete Varea is a PhD candidate at Brown University in the Department of Hispanic Studies. Her research interests include Latin American cinema, ecocriticism and the body.
Speaker Bio
Ennuri Jo is a film and visual studies scholar, currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is working on her first book manuscript that explores the relationship between water and world cinema. An accompanying digital humanities project, the Aqueous Earth Catalog, can be found at https://aqueous.earth.