Keynotes

Ursula HEISE, University of California at Los Angeles

Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and former President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Western Europe, and Japan; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include:

Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), 

Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur [After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture] (Suhrkamp, 2010)

Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science.

Heise is the Managing Editor of Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor, with Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2016). She is editor of the bookseries, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011.

Detailed information about her publications, upcoming lectures, and courses can be found on her website: http://www.uheise.net

Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex

Nicholas Royle has been Professor of English at the University of Sussex since 1999. He established the MA/PhD programme in Creative and Critical Writing in 2001 and is founding director of the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought.

He has previously taught at the University of Stirling, Scotland (1992-9), the University of Tampere, Finland (1987-92) and at the University of Oxford (1981-87).

Nicholas Royle has published many critical books and essays, from monographs devoted to the oeuvres of individual writers, in English literature or French philosophy, to vast theoretical essays on reading the literary, as well as novels and short stories (including quick fictions). Some of his books to date include: 

An English Guide to Birdwatching: A Novel (2017)

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Fifth edition, 2016, co-authored with Andrew Bennett) 

This Thing Called Literature (2015, co-authored with Andrew Bennett)

Veering:A Theory of Literature (2011)

Quilt: A Novel (with a Critical Afterword) (2010)

In Memory of Jacques Derrida (2009)

How to Read Shakespeare (2005, new edition 2014)

The Uncanny (2003)

Deconstructions: A User's Guide (2000) (as editor) 

E.M. Forster (1999)

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (1995, co-authored with Andrew Bennett) 

Royle is also an editor of the Oxford Literary Review, a journal with which he has been involved since the 1970s, and director of the app Quick Fictions. He is currently completing a book entitled Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing.

Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington

Jesse Oak Taylor is associate professor of English at the University of Washington. His research focuses on industrialization and empire in the nineteenth century and their relevance for understanding the ongoing processes (and social and ecological consequences) of industrialization and development around the globe. His recent book, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (University of Virginia Press, 2016) traces the conceptual emergence of climate change the soot-laden London fog (i.e., "smog") of London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project runs from the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851 to the "Great Smog Disaster" of 1952. It argues that aesthetics, especially the novel, re-frame our perception in order to come to terms with an environment in which everything, including the weather, bears the imprint of human action.

His current research explores the concept of the Anthropocene, especially in terms of the way it opens new methodologial intersections between the humanities and the sciences. At present, he is approaching this topic through Victorian evolutionary theory, asking how nineteenth century debates around species, geologic time, extinction, and the fossil record must be re-evaluated in light of the human species's emergence as a geologic agent at planetary scale during the same period. He is co-editor (with Tobias Menely, UC-Davis) of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (Penn State University Press, 2017), and co-organizer (with Jason Groves, UW Germanics) of a Simpson Center Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on the Anthropocene.

Webpage: https://english.washington.edu/people/jesse-oak-taylor 

Sarah Wood, Independant Scholar

Sarah Wood has studied English literature and spent many years working in universities. Her DPhil thought about the relation between poetic thinking, writing and life in the work of the great nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning. 

At Oxford in the early 80s she began to read the writings of Jacques Derrida, whose thinking and writing on psychoanalysis and everything else remains very important to her. There, she also began to read philosophy and psychoanalytic writing. At university she also first came across the work of Leo Bersani, and in the early 90s she heard Hélène Cixous give an unforgettable lecture on freedom. These writers interest her deeply for the courage, complexity, brilliance and truthfulness of their insight into the processes and obstacles of life.

Sarah Wood reads, writes, edits academic journals and occasionally gives papers in a way that engages psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy and the concerns they illuminate. She is an editor of the Oxford Literary Review, with an issue out this summer under the title Ext: Writing Extinction. She is also an editor of Angelaki and has put together special issues, such as Home and Family and Hotel Psychoanalysis.

For Sarah Wood, reading and writing, just like psychotherapy, are ways of picking up vital things that can go unnoticed. They make it possible to say things that have not yet been said. They demonstrate the overlooked interactions and relations that go on between people, and between us and the non-human world.

Sarah Wood published Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces (Edinburgh University Press) in 2014. 

Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, Plato’s Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts. Masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis. The acquiescence of reading, Wood shows, allows us to make contact with the unthinkable.