Before Environmentalism

Stubbs_2_TMarch 6, 2009
Annual EMC Conference
McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020)

The Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara is pleased to announce our Winter Conference, “Before Environmentalism,” which will take place on Friday, March 6, 2009 in the McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020.

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).

The EMC thanks the following conference sponsors

Department of English

American Cultures & Global Contexts Center

Interdisciplinary Humanities Center

Graduate Division

Department of Feminist Studies

Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management

Department of Environmental Studies


Call for Papers

The Early Modern Center of the University of California at Santa Barbara invites paper proposals for our 2009 Winter Conference, “Before Environmentalism.” The conference will take place on Friday, March 6, 2009 at UCSB.

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, UC Berkeley) and Jill Casid (Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Visual Culture Studies Program, University of Wisconsin).

We invite proposals for papers that will add to our understanding of the historical, cultural and political dialogues about the environment and the natural world that came “Before Environmentalism.”  We hope to include papers from a range of critical and disciplinary contexts, and we plan to incorporate investigations of literature and culture from the years 1500 to 1800. Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: pastoral, urban pastoral, country house poems, natural description, landscape, maps and map making, enclosure laws, herbals, botany, prodigies and natural disasters, technology as mediator between humans and their environment, almanacs and the nature world, farming practices, and emerging science.

Please send abstracts, 300-500 words in length, to EMCConference@gmail.com by December 19, 2008. For more information, see the EMC Conference website, and feel free to contact Cat Zusky at zusky@umail.ucsb.edu or Pax Hehmeyer at hehmeyer@umail.ucsb.edu with specific questions.


Conference Schedule

8:30-9:00 | Conference Registration and Coffee

9:00-9:15 | Welcome Address: Professor Ken Hiltner, Director of the EMC

9:15-10:35 | Keynote Speaker: Carolyn Merchant, UC Berkeley, “Controlling Nature: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation”
Introduced by Ken Hiltner, Department of English, UCSB

10:35-10:45 | Break

10:45-12:00 | Panel One: The Empire Lands
Moderator: William Gahan, Department of English, UCSB

Ian MacInnes: “Showing the mettle of your pasture: Animal fodder as national identity in early modern England”
Gregory Schnitzspahn: “The New River’s “Well-Wishers”: Hugh Myddelton, Thomas Middleton, and Privatization of Water in Early Modern England”
Edward Test: “Bringing the Environment Home: the Development of Botanical Studies in 16th Century Europe”
John Wing: “Forest Maps and Royal Bureaucrats: Spanish state formation and the creation of an early modern geographic information system”

12:00-1:00 | Lunch

1:00-2:20 | Keynote Speaker: Jill Casid, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Practices of Change at the Edges of the Human: Transplantation and Cross-Species Encounter in the Eighteenth Century”
Introduced by Ann Bermingham, History of Art and Architecture, UCSB

2:20-2:30 | Break

2:30-3:30 | Panel Two: Political and Social Landscaping
Moderator: E. Heckendorn Cook, Department of English, UCSB

Rachel Crawford: “Simplex Munditiis: English Formality and the Seventeenth-Century Garden”
Calley A. Hornbuckle: “Ann Radcliffe’s Latent Environmentalism”
Jennifer Ohlund: “The “Miry Trace”: Contamination in John Gay’s Trivia”

3:30-3:45 | Break

3:45-4:45 | Panel Three: The Smell of Words
Moderator: Eileen Boris, Department of Feminist Studies, UCSB

Jayne Lewis: “Experiments, Observations, and the Gothic Grammar of Atmosphere”
Rachel Ann Hanan: “The Physics of Rhetoric in Puttenham’s Arte “

4:45-5:00 | Closing


Conference Dinner

Participants in the “Before Environmentalism” Conference are invited to attend a dinner after the event, on Friday, March 6 at 6:30 at the Santa Barbara Fish House, which is located at 101 E. Cabrillo Blvd in downtown Santa Barbara. Please email Cat Zusky at EMCConference@gmail.com if you would like to join us.