Texer Logo White

Empires & Ecologies

June 4, 2021
Websites
Empire & Ecologies

Responding to scholarship that has emphasised the ecological consequences of the long histories of empire and how, in turn, empires are shaped by environments, Empire and Ecologies took a humanities-centred and multidisciplinary approach to methodological issues and case studies that examined the construction of nature by various forms of imperial power across a range of periods and locations.

The Empire and Ecologies symposium (1-2 July 2021) featured discussions on blue humanities, environmental disaster, extractivism, biodiversity, critical Indigenous studies and ecologies in antiquity. Commissioned as part of the symposium’s panel on ‘creative praxis of empire and ecologies’, Dr Amy Cutler created and produced a new short film, The Video Book of Orchids (2021).

Funded by the UCD Humanities Institute Seed Funding Scheme and the European Research Council (SouthHem project), and supported by the UCD Environmental Humanities research strand, Empire and Ecologies highlighted the research of international collaborators and members of the UCD Environmental Humanities research strand.

Research Aims

Empire and Ecologies aimed to facilitate conversations across transhistorical and transimperial contexts, from imperial ecologies in Antiquity and the imperialism of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries to forms of ‘new imperialism’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and across a range of locations, from colonies and metropoles of Anglophone empire to contexts of empire in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

The roundtable on methodologies for studying extractivism included speakers Professor Jennifer Wenzel(Columbia), Professor Katayoun Shafiee (Warwick), Dr Simon Jackson (Birmingham), Professor Sukanya Banerjee (Berkeley), Professor Elizabeth Miller (UC Davis), Chair:Professor John Brannigan (UCD), Director of the UCD Environmental Humanities research strand: Dr Sharae Deckard (UCD).

A key aim of Empire and Ecologies was to support the development of the UCD Environmental Humanities research strand. Members of the research strand organised and convened the symposium’s panels and roundtable. The final symposium programme can be viewed on the Empire and Ecologies website.

Timeline

Pre-recorded papers were available to view on the Empire and Ecologies website the week before the synchronous panel discussions and roundtable took place on 1-2 July 2021.

Podcast recordings of the roundtable and panel discussions are available on the Empire and Ecologies website and UCD Humanities Institute SoundCloud channel.

Dr Amy Cutler’s commissioned short film,The Video Book of Orchids (2021), is available to view on the Empire and Ecologies website.

Funding

Funding for Empire and Ecologies was generously provided by the UCD Humanities Institute Seed Funding Scheme and the European Research Council (SouthHem Project).

Theme Leads

Dr. Sarah Comyn
Dr. Sarah Comyn Lecturer​/Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow
Dr Sarah Comyn is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film. She was previously an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-2020), and an ERC Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof. Porscha Fermanis on the SouthHem project (2016-2018). Her research interests are in the transhistorical and transnational narratives concerning literary value and culture, settler colonial literature, and literary institutions of the long nineteenth century. Recent publications include: Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of “Homo Economicus” (Palgrave, 2018), Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies (Manchester UP, 2021; ed. with Porscha Fermanis), and Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (Palgrave, 2019; with Lara Atkin, Porscha Fermanis and Nathan Garvey). Dr Comyn is currently working on a study of the impact of the extractive mineral industries on the developing Anglophone literary cultures of the British settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the period 1842–1910.
Dr. Megan Kuster
Dr. Megan Kuster ERC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin
Dr. Megan Kuster is the project manager and a Co-I of the Post-extractivist legacies and landscapes: Humanities, artistic and activist responses project (CHCI – Global Humanities Institute 2023; PI Prof. Anne Fuchs) in the UCD Humanities Institute. She was previously an ERC Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof. Porscha Fermanis on the SouthHem project (2019-2021) in the School of English, Drama and Film. Recent publications include: Global Commodity Chains and Local Use-Value: William Colenso, natural history collecting and Indigenous labour (Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History, 2021) and Domestic Settler Colonialism in Katherine Mansfield’s “Old Tar” and “The Garden Party”, (Tinakori, 2020). Her main research interests are in the transhistorical and transregional narratives and legacies concerning settler colonial literature, environments and scientific networks, especially around issues of race, labour and capital in the long nineteenth century.
Go to site

You may also like