Lisa Vetere, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of English, was invited to join a group of scholars at Teleborg Castle on the Linnaeus University campus in Växjö, Sweden from May 29—June 2, 2019 to work on a new book project entitled “Gothic and the Anthropocene” (under consideration by Edinburgh University Press).
Organized by leaders of both the International Centre for Gothic Studies and the International Gothic Association, this project seeks to bring together scholars in the emerging field of “eco-gothic.” They seek to examine how the gothic narrative mode, focused as it is on stories of monstrosity and terror, “is uniquely placed to problematize anthropocentrism and to narrate the planet as a multi-species ecology of which the human is a part, but which this same human is also instrumental in destroying.”
The project is fully sponsored by a grant from the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, including all travel and lodging expenses. Vetere will contribute a chapter—”The Horrors of the Horticultural: Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Wieland’ (1798) and the Anthropocene”—which explores the practice of ornamental landscape gardening in the construction of early American gothic texts and continues her work in expanding the understanding of 19th-century American literature to include the agency of nonhuman elements.
Vetere has taught several courses on American gothic and ghost stories and has published and presented on eco-gothic topics in the United States and in Europe. This will be Vetere’s first time staying in a castle.
