This conference will be a forum to showcase outstanding undergraduate work on the early modern period (1500-1800). The event will take place from 1-4 on June 5 in South Hall 2635, and will be followed by a reception.

On May 15, Angus Fletcher will present a talk entitled "Poetry, Environment, and the Protected Circle of Wonder." Fletcher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate School, author of A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. According to Jonathan Bate, "Angus Fletcher is a highly distinguished critic and his New Theory for American Poetry is an appropriately distinguished contribution to the new wave of literary theory that restores the imagination, the aesthetic, the emotions and the natural world to critical discourse." Harold Bloom says, "Angus Fletcher and his work have strongly influenced the way I read poetry…His new book is the crown of his career: bold, original, brimming with imaginative energy on every page."

The Bliss-Zimmerman Seminar will take place at 2:00 in South Hall 2635 and will be followed by a reception. Please join us!

In recent years, scholars have looked to the Renaissance and eighteenth century in order to better understand both the origins of our contemporary environmental crisis, as well as the emergence of modern environmental thinking. Works such as Robert Watson's Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance and Gabriel Egan's Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism, have brought early modern literary studies into current ecocritical debate. As these and other works make clear, environmental issues such as air pollution, toxic waste, increased urbanization, deforestation, wetland loss, and radical changes in land use were surprisingly timely in Early Modern England, routinely making their appearance in the literature of the day. Indeed, by the time Milton was writing Paradise Lost it was already known that respiratory illness from urban air pollution was second only to the Plague as the leading cause of death in London. The EMC's one-day interdisciplinary conference will provide a forum to explore early modern literary and cultural responses to the environmental issues that preceded, and indeed gave shape to, modern environmentalism.

The conference will consist of panel discussions, as well as keynote talks by Carolyn Merchant (Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley) and Jill Casid (Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Visual Culture Studies Program, University of Wisconsin).

For more information, please see our conference website at Before Environmentalism Conference

Robert N. Watson is a Professor of English at UCLA, and author of Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Pennsylvania UP, 2006), named the Best Book of Ecocriticism of 2005-2006 by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He was the winner of the 2006 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize for the year's best book in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, by the editors of Studies in English Literature. Professor Watson's presentation for this EMC event is entitled "The Ecology of Self in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'"

Beth Fowkes Tobin is a Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the author of Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (Pennsylvania UP, 2005) and Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Duke UP, 1999). Professor Tobin's presentation for the Colloquium is entitled "The Duchess's Shells: Natural History Collecting, Gender, and Scientific Practice."