Conference Programme
DAY 1: Thursday 3 April 2025
HF 580F, Halle aux Farines, Université Paris Cité, 9 Esp. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 75013 Paris
9.00-9.10: WELCOME AND COFFEE/TEA
9.15-9.30: OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE
9.30-10.45: PANEL 1 – Reworking Elegy. Chair: Héloïse Lecomte (IHRIM)
- MONTIN Sarah (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France): ‘Eclogues in absentia: Preemptive elegies and anticipatory grief in contemporary anglophone poetry’
- HAMER Nicola (University of Warwick, UK): ‘Beyond elegy, or, towards a poetics of ecological grief’
- VITTONATTO Silvia (University College London, UK): ‘Times of Grief: On the Temporality of Contemporary Ecological Elegies’
10.45-11.05: COFFEE/TEA BREAK
11.05-12.00: PANEL 2 – Staging Environmental Grief. Chair: Solange Ayache (INSPE Paris)
- ANGELAKI Vicky (Mid Sweden University, Sweden): ‘Imag(in)ing Grief: Eco-Mourning Reframed in the Work of Caryl Churchill’
- PEGHINELLI Andrea (Sapienza – University of Rome, Italy): ‘“And can aught grieve save humanity?”: Fear and Grief for an Ecological Catastrophe in Modern and Contemporary Drama’
12.00-12.55: PANEL 3 – Spectralities. Chair: Pr. Catherine Bernard (Université Paris Cité)
- MOORE Sarah J. (University of Arizona, USA): ‘Mourning Trees: Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest’
- MORISSON Valérie (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France): ‘Ec(h)omourning and transcorporeal un-mapping in Ailbhe Ní Bhrian’s works’
13.00-14.25: LUNCH BREAK
14.25-16.00: PANEL 4 – Blue Ecological Grief. Chair: Pr. Bénédicte Meillon (Université d’Angers)
- DELAPORTE Marie-Laure (Université Paris Nanterre, France): ‘Between mourning and resilience: the figure of the mermaid as blue ecofeminism in the arts’
- FECTEAU Maxime (Université du Québec, Montréal, Canada): ‘“In the Middle of Everywhere’: Sylvia Earle and the Articulation of Blue Grief’
- RAJA Ambika (University of Warwick, UK): ‘Battling extinction of non-human kin: A comparative reading of Solastalgia in world-literary fiction’
- BOTELHO Teresa (Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal) ‘Grieving on Toxic Waters: Writing the Common Vulnerability of Human and More-than-human Lives in Twenty-First Century American Literature’
16.00-16.20: COFFEE/TEA BREAK
16.20-17.20: KEYNOTE LECTURE – Stef Craps (Ghent University, Belgium) ‘Ecological Apologies: Reckoning with Grief, Guilt, and Multispecies Justice’
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DAY 2: Friday 4 April 2025
Room 1021, Bâtiment Sophie Germain, Université Paris Cité, Pl. Aurélie Nemours, 75013 Paris
9.15-10.30: PANEL 5 – Mourning Trees. Chair: Pr. Sarah J. Moore (University of Arizona)
- LEBLOND Diane (Université de Lorraine, Metz, France): ‘Ghostly trees, bones and butterflies mourning a more-than-human world: Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees (2021), towards a hauntology of living things’
- BRONNER Irène (University of Johannesburg, South Africa): ‘Tamara Kostianovsky’s Tree Stumps’ (online)
- BIRAT Kathie (Université de Lorraine, Metz, France): ‘Resistant Mourning: Fictional representations of environmental loss’
10.30-10.50: COFFEE/TEA BREAK
10.50-12.05: PANEL 6 – Indigenous Experiences of Environmental Grief. Chair: Robert Ivermee (ICP)
- APOSPORI Fani (University of Edinburgh, UK): ‘To get to this tomb take a canoe’
- WIECZOREK Paula (University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów, Poland): ‘Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Ghostly Forms in Indigenous Speculative Fiction’
- ZIAVRA Elpida (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece): ‘The Writing of the Ecological Disaster: Mourning the Ungrievable in 21st Century Anishinaabe-Canadian Poetry and Visual Arts’
12.05-14.00: LUNCH BREAK
14.00-15.00: PANEL 7 – Ecological Grief, Affect and Melancholy. Chair: Pr. Sara Thornton (Université Paris Cité)
- CARLILL Alice (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK): ‘Living the ‘“barely bearable”’: Ecological Grief and Depression in Weather and The High House’
- ISHCHENKO Anna (Linnaeus University, Sweden): ‘Towards Environmental Melancholy in Narrative Video Games’
15.00-15.20: COFFEE/TEA BREAK
15.20-16.35: PANEL 8 – Extinctions. Chair: Pr. Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité)
- BEDARD-GOULET Sara (Utrecht University, Netherlands) and FERWERDA Susanne (Utrecht University, Netherlands): ‘Tracing Extinction in Australia: Artistic Attunements to Vanished Species’
- BENSON Alex (Bard College, USA): ‘Extinction and Enjambment’
- ŠLAPKAUSKAUTE Rūta (Vilnius University, Lithuania): ‘Funny Bones: The Commedification of Extinction in Chris Flynn’s Mammoth’
16.35-16.45: CLOSING REMARKS AND END OF THE CONFERENCE
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Organising committee: Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon/IHRIM), Estelle Murail (ICP/ECHELLES), Laura Ouillon (Université Paris Cité/ECHELLES).
With the support of: ECHELLES – UMR 8264, Institut Catholique de Paris, IHRIM (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités – CNRS UMR 5317) and SEAC (Société d’Etudes Anglaises Contemporaines / Society of Contemporary British Studies)