Empire and Ecologies Online Conference
An interdisciplinary symposium examining the construction of nature by various forms of imperial power across a range of periods & locations
Empire and Ecologies: Transimperial, transhistorical and transregional natures from the 17th to the 21st century
The symposium’s synchronous roundtable and panel discussions will be held Thursday, July 1 and Friday, July 2, 2021, online (via Zoom).
Responding to scholarship that has emphasised the ecological consequences of the long histories of empire and how, in turn, empires are shaped by environments, ‘Empire and Ecologies’ takes a humanities-centred and multidisciplinary approach to methodological issues and case studies that examine the construction of nature by various forms of imperial power across a range of periods and locations.
‘Empire and Ecologies’ aims to facilitate conversations across transhistorical and transimperial contexts: from the imperialism of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries to forms of ‘new imperialism’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a range of locations, from colonies and metropoles of Anglophone empire to Hispanophone and Russian/Soviet contexts of empire.
Bringing together different disciplinary perspectives—such as literary and cultural scholarship, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, transnational studies, critical Indigenous studies, creative praxis, and the history of colonial commodities and natural resources—this symposium will offer new perspectives on the following themes: blue humanities; disaster and environmental crisis; empire and built environments in the Atlantic world; extractivism; biodiversity and critical Indigenous studies; and ecologies in the empires of antiquity.
1-2 July 12:30-16:45 BST
@arts.humanitiesucd
