2025 Burdick-Vary Symposium organized by Professor Mario Ortiz-Robles, open-topic Senior Fellow (2021–2025), and the Institute for Research in the Humanities.
This year’s meeting of the Vcologies (“Victorian Ecologies”) Working Group, a multi-institutional group of scholars whose work focuses on nineteenth-century ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities, will focus on the idea of futurity. The fourteen visiting participants, leading scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and culture, will consider how Victorian representations of the environment envisioned, implicitly and explicitly, the future of nonhuman life on the planet and the extent to which this historical sense of futurity makes the Victorians, to use Charles Taylor’s suggestive phrase, “our contemporaries.” The conference will consist of a series of panel discussions featuring brief samples of work-in-progress circulated in advance and a place-based workshop that will take place at the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, WI, where we will explore Leopold’s legacy and the relation his writings bear to the rich tradition of Victorian nature writing. The conference is free and open to the public. Pre-circulated papers available upon request.
Schedule
Papers are pre-circulated. For more information, contact mortizrobles@wisc.edu
Friday, February 26
- 9:00 am Opening Remarks
- 9:15 pm Panel 1
- Deanna Kreisel, University of Mississippi. “Re-Wild Thing”
- Devin Garofalo, University of California, San Diego. “John Ruskin, Sylvia Wynter, and Desupernaturalization”
- Kathleen Frederickson, University of California, Davis. “Fenland Malthus”
- 10:45 am Break
- 11:00 am Panel 2
- Lynn Voksuil, University of Houston. “Empire and Ecocritique”
- Lindsay Wells, UCLA. “Evergreen Empire: Plants, Power, and Painting in Nineteenth-Century Britain”
- Eric Gidal, University of Iowa. “Landscape and Environment”
- Kate Flint, University of Southern California. “Melting, Crumbling, Matter”
- 1:00 pm Lunch
- 2:00 pm Panel 3
- Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington. “Ecoaesthetics”
- Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California. “Ecoaesthetics”
- John MacNeill Miller, Allegheny College. “The Poetics of Science”
- Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Charismatic Fauna and Victorian Celebrity Culture”
- 3:45 pm Break
- 4:00 pm Graduate Student Gathering, Memorial Union Terrace
Saturday, September 27
- 9:00 am Panel 4
- Elizabeth Miller, University of California, Davis. “‘Borne along by the Tide’: Steamships, Fossil Fuels, and The Mill on the Floss.”
- Michael Tondre, Stony Brook University (SUNY). “On Petro-Liberation: Oil and Utopia, c. 1871”
- Benjamin Morgan, University of Chicago. “Planetary Scale in Weird and Decadent Fiction: M.P. Shiel, H.P. Lovecraft, and William Hope Hodgson”
- 11:00 am Lunch
- 12:00 pm Travel to Place-based workshop
- 1:00 pm Tour of Aldo Leopold Foundation
E13701 Levee Road
Baraboo, WI, 53913
608-355-0279
Event co-sponsored by:
The Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Burdick-Vary Symposium Fund, and the Anonymous Fund.
