Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

Life in the Death Zone: Reading for the Planet in Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayan Journals and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

This talk traces an Earth system imaginary in two nineteenth-century texts centrally concerned with climate as a manifestation of planetary difference, juxtaposing botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayan Journals (1854), which recounts his three-year journey through India, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal, with a novel that announces its investment in questions of climate, altitude, and exposure on its title page: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), published the year before Hooker departed on his expedition. The incongruity is the point. The Himalaya presents Earth’s immense climatic variability, from the tropics to the so-called “death zone” beyond which life essentially stops, in close proximity. Though the Yorkshire moors rise no more than 1,500 feet above sea level, they are no less exposed to the vagaries of the Earth system, rendered habitable only by the Gulf Stream, a trans-Atlantic current that offers a climatological equivalent to the slave trade, which operates a key enabling context for the novel’s world. If the high Himalaya offers a “death zone” of one kind, testing the limits at which life can endure, Wuthering Heights, replete with intergenerational violence of multiple kinds, transforms that idea into a geohistorical zone in ways that serve to model the intersection between climate in both its meteorological and cultural or historical senses via the mediating work of literary form.

Jonathan Howard
Departments of English and Black Studies at Yale University

The Atlantic Opportunity: Race, Nature, and the Making of the Modern World

This lecture considers the environmental implications of the transatlantic crossings of Europe and Africa, as they are respectively represented in Arnold Guyot’s The Earth and Man and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Broadly, Professor Howard will argue that these crossings give rise to two radically divergent interfaces with the planet: whiteness’s stand your ground subjectivity and blackness’s ongoing inhabitation of the deep.

Sarah Dimick
Department of English at Northwestern University

The Missing Things People

In this era of climate disturbance, how do we decipher genres produced by increasing displacement and unhousing? How do we understand documents of loss? In this talk, Professor Dimick reads lists of objects confiscated during sweeps of unhoused encampments—seizure medication, a thick coat, a Ziplock bag full of tampons, a clean pair of socks, Pampers, a Social Security card—in light of the literary history of the ode. Moving from Keats and Neruda to present heatwaves and Grants Pass vs. Johnson, she argues that these missing things are freighted with the kind of value best expressed in an ode. Their absence increases environmental risk, leaving unhoused residents of a city exposed to extreme temperatures, discomfort, and illness. But their absence also wrenches apart memories and meaning. Framing descriptions of these missing things in relation to the ode allows their loss to fully register, transforming a bureaucratic catalogue into poetic significance.

Min Hyoung Song
Department of English at Boston College

Birth Rates, Borders, and Invasion

Professor Hyoung’s presentation will focus on how contemporary discourses about climate change are increasingly being marked by a focus on birth rates, borders, and invasion, which have long been a preoccupation both in far-right literary circles (such as in The Camp of the Saints [1973]) and among US environmentalist thought (as exemplified by Garret Hardin’s essay popularizing the term “tragedy of the commons).