Landscapes

Online Postgraduate Colloquium

Wednesday 25th & Thursday 26th November 2020

School of English, University of Sheffield


With extreme weather events, governments in crisis and sea levels on the rise, environmental and political climates seem to have reached a boiling point. In a society in turmoil over Brexit negotiations, the climate crisis often goes ignored. Whether political or environmental, it is abundantly clear that the landscapes we inhabit are no longer defined by stable factors, if they ever were. How do we make sense of these landscapes during turbulent times in which their topographies are constantly shifting? Tomorrow we may hear that yet another animal has gone extinct, or that we are facing another Brexit extension. How might the landscapes we live in – whether ecological, political, cultural, or otherwise – be redefined in a way that responds to the most urgent challenges of our time?


What is the postgraduate colloquium?

The Postgraduate Colloquium is an online two-day conference organised by postgraduate students from the University of Sheffield's School of English. We hope to bring together students and early career researchers from a range of disciplines including English Literature, Linguistics, Creative Writing, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, History, Philosophy, Geography and Music. The theme of this year's interdisciplinary conference is Landscapes.


When?

Wednesday 25th November & Thursday 26th November 2020

Where?

Online (both live and via website): Click here to register via Eventbrite

Keynote Speakers

We are delighted to announce two keynote speakers for the Landscapes online conference:

Dr John Miller

Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield

"Post-Meat Landscapes in Utopian and Science Fiction" (Weds 25th November, 10am GMT)

John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, co-director of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre) and President of ASLE-UKI (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland). His books include Empire and the Animal Body (2012) and Walrus (2014, with Louise Miller). Most recently, he has edited two anthologies for the British Library Tales of the Weird series: Tales of the Tattooed (2019) and Weird Woods (2020).


Professor Madhu Krishnan

Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol

"Contemporary African Writing and the Landscapes of Literary Production" (Thurs 26th November, 11am GMT)

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018). She is currently working on a five-year ERC funded project around literary activism in twenty-first century Africa, focusing on the role of literary collectives in Nigeria, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Uganda and Kenya in the production of the social.

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