International Conference, 3-4 April 2025, Université Paris Cité, LARCA & Institut Catholique de Paris

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

DAY 1: Thursday 3 April 2025

Amphi plat HF 580F, Halle aux Farines, 9 Esp. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 75013 Paris

9.00-9.10: WELCOME AND COFFEE/TEA

9.15-9.30: OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE

9.30-10.45: PANEL 1 – Reworking Elegy. Chair: Héloïse Lecomte (IHRIM)

  • MONTIN Sarah (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France): ‘Eclogues in absentia: Preemptive elegies and anticipatory grief in contemporary anglophone poetry’ 
  • HAMER Nicola (University of Warwick, UK): ‘Beyond elegy, or, towards a poetics of ecological grief’ 
  • VITTONATTO Silvia (University College London, UK): ‘Times of Grief: On the Temporality of Contemporary Ecological Elegies’

10.45-11.05: COFFEE/TEA BREAK

11.05-12.00: PANEL 2 – Staging Environmental Grief. Chair: Solange Ayache (INSPE Paris)

  • ANGELAKI Vicky (Mid Sweden University, Sweden): ‘Imag(in)ing Grief:  Eco-Mourning Reframed in the Work of Caryl Churchill’ 
  • PEGHINELLI Andrea (Sapienza – University of Rome, Italy): ‘“And can aught grieve save humanity?”: Fear and Grief for an Ecological Catastrophe in Modern and Contemporary Drama’

12.00-12.55: PANEL 3 – Spectralities. Chair: Pr. Catherine Bernard (Université Paris Cité)

  • MOORE Sarah J. (University of Arizona, USA): ‘Mourning Trees: Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest’ 
  • MORISSON Valérie (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France): ‘Ec(h)omourning and transcorporeal un-mapping in Ailbhe Ní Bhrian’s works’

13.00-14.25: LUNCH BREAK

14.25-16.00: PANEL 4 – Blue Ecological Grief. Chair: Pr. Bénédicte Meillon (Université d’Angers)

  • DELAPORTE Marie-Laure (Université Paris Nanterre, France): ‘Between mourning and resilience: the figure of the mermaid as blue ecofeminism in the arts’ 
  • FECTEAU Maxime (Université du Québec, Montréal, Canada): ‘“In the Middle of Everywhere’: Sylvia Earle and the Articulation of Blue Grief’
  • RAJA Ambika (University of Warwick, UK): ‘Battling extinction of non-human kin: A comparative reading of Solastalgia in world-literary fiction’ 
  • BOTELHO Teresa (Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal) ‘Grieving on Toxic Waters: Writing the Common Vulnerability of Human and More-than-human Lives in Twenty-First Century American Literature’ 

16.00-16.20: COFFEE/TEA BREAK

16.20-17.20: KEYNOTE LECTURE – Stef Craps (Ghent University, Belgium) ‘Ecological Apologies: Reckoning with Grief, Guilt, and Multispecies Justice’

***

DAY 2: Friday 4 April 2025

Room 1021, Bâtiment Sophie Germain, Pl. Aurélie Nemours, 75013 Paris

9.15-10.30: PANEL 5 – Mourning Trees . Chair: Pr. Sarah J. Moore (University of Arizona)

  • LEBLOND Diane (Université de Lorraine, Metz, France): ‘Ghostly trees, bones and butterflies mourning a more-than-human world: Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees (2021), towards a hauntology of living things’ 
  • BRONNER Irène (University of Johannesburg, South Africa): ‘Tamara Kostianovsky’s Tree Stumps’ (online)
  • BIRAT Kathie (Université de Lorraine, Metz, France): ‘Resistant Mourning: Fictional representations of environmental loss’ 

10.30-10.50: COFFEE/TEA BREAK

10.50-12.05: PANEL 6 – Indigenous Experiences of Environmental Grief. Chair: Robert Ivermee (ICP)

  • APOSPORI Fani (University of Edinburgh, UK): ‘To get to this tomb take a canoe’ 
  • WIECZOREK Paula (University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów, Poland): ‘Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Ghostly Forms in Indigenous Speculative Fiction’ 
  • ZIAVRA Elpida (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece): ‘The Writing of the Ecological Disaster: Mourning the Ungrievable in 21st Century Anishinaabe-Canadian Poetry and Visual Arts’ 

12.05-14.00: LUNCH BREAK (Salle SG 1004)

14.00-15.00: PANEL 7 – Ecological Grief, Affect and Melancholy. Chair: Pr. Sara Thornton (Université Paris Cité)

  • CARLILL Alice (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK): ‘Living the ‘“barely bearable”’: Ecological Grief and Depression in Weather and The High House’ 
  • ISHCHENKO Anna (Linnaeus University, Sweden): ‘Towards Environmental Melancholy in Narrative Video Games’ 

15.00-15.20: COFFEE/TEA BREAK 

15.20-16.35: PANEL 8 – Extinctions. Chair: Pr. Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité)

  • BEDARD-GOULET Sara (Utrecht University, Netherlands) and FERWERDA Susanne (Utrecht University, Netherlands): ‘Tracing Extinction in Australia: Artistic Attunements to Vanished Species’ 
  • BENSON Alex (Bard College, USA): ‘Extinction and Enjambment’ 
  • ŠLAPKAUSKAUTE Rūta (Vilnius University, Lithuania): ‘Funny Bones: The Commedification of Extinction in Chris Flynn’s Mammoth’ 

16.35-16.45: CLOSING REMARKS AND END OF THE CONFERENCE

With the support of: ECHELLES – UMR 8264, Institut Catholique de Paris, IHRIM (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités – CNRS UMR 5317) and SEAC (Société d’Etudes Anglaises Contemporaines / Society of Contemporary British Studies)

Call for Papers:

The work of Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004) drew attention to ‘the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary concepts of […] what counts as a grievable life and a grievable death’ (xvi). In her wake, in Mourning Nature (2017), climate change and mental health researcher Ashlee Cunsolo and landscape architect Karen Landman have outlined the complexities of thinking about the grievability of the non-human, and, more broadly, ‘ecological grief,’ this kind of ‘mourning that resists the artificial separation between bodies that can and cannot be mourned’: ‘It is about recognizing our shared vulnerabilities to human and non-human bodies, and embracing our complicity in the death of these other bodies – however painful that process may be.’ (Cunsolo 3-4) 

This conference proposes to explore the concept of ecological grief and the fast-growing body of theoretical work that is developing around it against the background of the ongoing sixth-mass extinction and biodiversity loss. The broader reflection about the Anthropocene has also highlighted new ways of reflecting, imagining and representing human and non-human relationships by contributing to decentring human subjectivities and offering new understandings of the living. With this conference, we also wish to think about the longer history of ecological grief from the eighteenth century onwards, including by exploring some of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. 

Both writers and artists have explored new ways of ‘mourn[ing] beyond the human’ (Cunsolo and Landman, 2), grieving for past, present and future ecological losses, attempting to visualise and express ecological grief but also to carve out spaces of remembrance. In literature, the poetic subgenre of the pastoral elegy is built on the poet’s acceptance of ‘death as natural […], in line with the season pattern of death and rebirth’ (Twiddy 2012, 4). However, the loss of nature itself (turning it into a mirror of human loss) redefines the traditional elegy’s search for consolation (Sacks 1987, 3). This redefines the very function of the pastoral, leading to the emergence of new subcategories such as the ‘anti-pastoral elegy’ (Gilbert 1999, 188) or the ‘ecological lament,’ thus defined by Timothy Morton: ‘In elegy, the person departs and the environment echoes our woe. In ecological lament, we fear that we will go on living, while the environment disappears around us. Ultimately, imagine the very air we breathe vanishing – we will literally be unable to have any more elegies, because we will all be dead. It is strictly impossible for us to mourn this absolute, radical loss.’ (Morton, 186) The very possibility of mourning nature is therefore questioned – is nature grievable? How do we grieve for it? What is the role of writers and artists in this individual and collective process? While to some, environmental grief gives way to desolation or an irredeemable sense of melancholy, others view it as a form of resilience or even a spur to action, a source of activism in art.

The conference welcomes contributions from researchers working in the fields of literature, art history, visual studies, music studies, film studies, game studies, cultural studies, philosophy and anthropology. We particularly welcome submissions that revolve around, but are not limited to, the following concepts and themes:

  • The (un)grievability of the natural environment and the non-human
  • Old and new forms of elegy and ‘ecological lament’ (Morton, 186): the (anti-)pastoral elegy, the proleptic ecological elegy
  • Individual and collective mourning rituals ; creative approaches and responses to grief, mourning, loss and resilience
  • Human and non-human mourning; shared grief
  • The politics of grief; artivism and literature as a form of environmental activism
  • Solastalgia and melancholia 
  • Eco-anxiety and anticipatory grief
  • Extinction 
  • Epidemics and plagues
  • Memorials, memento mori and other ways of remembering
  • Ghosts and spectrality

Organising committee

The conference is planned as an on-site event and will take place at the Université Paris Cité on 3-4 April 2025. 

This conference is organised by members of the ‘Environmental Humanities’ research teams of the Research Laboratory on English-Speaking Cultures (LARCA – CNRS UMR 8225) of the Université Paris Cité and the Catholic University of Paris (research unit ‘Religion, Culture & Society’, EA 7403) and of the Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM – CNRS UMR 5317) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France.

  • Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon)
  • Estelle Murail (Institut Catholique de Paris / Université Paris Cité)
  • Laura Ouillon (Université Paris Cité)

Indicative bibliography

  • ALBRECHT, Glenn A. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.
  • ALBRECHT, Glenn A. ‘“Solastalgia”. New concept in human health and identity.’ Nature 3 (2005): 44-59.
  • BARNETT, Joshua Trey. Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022.
  • BUHNER, Stephen Harrod. Earth Grief: The Journey into and Through Ecological Grief. White River Junction: Raven Press, 2022.
  • BUTLER, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
  • CAMPBELL, SueEllen. Even Mountains Vanish: Searching for Solace in an Age of Extinction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003.
  • CLARK, Timothy. ‘Ecological Grief and Anthropocene Horror’. American Imago 77, no. 1 (2020): 61–80. 
  • CUNSOLO, Ashlee and Karen LANDMAN, eds. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Montreal & Kingston ; London ; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017. 
  • GILLESPIE, Kathryn Gillespie, and Patricia J. LOPEZ. Vulnerable Witness: The Politics of Grief in the Field. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.
  • HEISE, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
  • KENNEDY, David. Elegy, London: Routledge, 2007.
  • KOLBERT, Elizabeth.The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Picador, 2015.
  • LEAR, Jonathan. Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2022.
  • LERTZMAN, Renee. Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. Hove ; New York: Routledge, 2015.
  • LYSACK, Krista. ‘“The Cruel East Wind”: Brontë Weather and the Observance of Ecological Grief.’ Victorian Review 47, no. 1 (2021): 25–29.
  • MORIZOT, Baptiste. ‘Ce mal du pays sans exil. Les affects du mauvais temps qui vient.’ Critique, 860-861 (2019): 1-2.
  • MORTIMER-SANDILANDS, Catriona. ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies.’ In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 331–58.
  • MORTON, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge [Mass.]: Harvard University Press, 2009.
  • RAMAZANI, Jahan. The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
  • ROSE, Deborah Bird, Thom VAN DOOREN and Matthew CHRULEW, eds. Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
  • SCRANTON, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015.
  • VAN DOOREN, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.