Nathan Hensley | No Escape, No Ending: Gesture, Improvisation, Solidarity

CAS Climate | Change Initiative: VICTORIAN CULTURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE SPEAKER SERIES. Professor Hensley draws on his recent book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (Chicago, 2025) to discuss various 19th-century aesthetic objects and how they construed revolution in a minor key, rescaling action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. Focusing on such tiny disruptions demonstrates how close attention to Victorian literature can recover a prehistory for the deeply felt sense of powerlessness many of us know all too well today.