Lots of great events are happening this month! Among them is the next JNT Dialogue — Nonhumans: Ecology, Ethics, Objects — on Thursday, March 15, 5:00-6:30 pm in Rm. 310A at the Student Center. Featured speakers will be Tim Morton and Jeffrey Cohen. The event will be moderated by Eileen Joy. (Also, there will be an open gathering for students and faculty at Frenchies in Depot Town at 8:30 pm that evening to meet the speakers. Free food will be provided and drinks will be available for purchase.)
Timothy Morton will present “Whales within Whales: Ecological Emergency as the End of Human Narrative.” He is Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (forthcoming from Open Humanities Press), The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007), seven other books and over seventy essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. He blogs regularly at http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.
Jeffrey J. Cohen will present “Elemental Relations.” He is Professor of English and the Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at the George Washington University. His research explores what monsters reveal about the cultures that dream them; the literatures of the British archipelago; how postcolonial studies, queer theory, and posthumanism might help us to better understand early texts and cultures (and might be transformed by that encounter); and the complicated lives of what is supposed to be inanimate. “Stories of Stone,” his current project, is funded by fellowships from the ACLS and the Guggenheim Foundation, and investigates the liveliness of our most seemingly inert substance. He is also editing a collection for the University of Minnesota Press on Prismatic Ecologies: Ecotheory Beyond Green.
Moderator Eileen Joy is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches courses in medieval literature, contemporary fiction, and critical theory. She is the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group (http://www.babelworkinggroup.org), Co-Editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, Co-Director of punctum books (http://punctumbooks.com), and has published numerous essays and articles on medieval literature, cultural studies, post/humanism, and ethics.
Note: this is a Learning Beyond the Classroom (LBC) approved event.