Heide Estes, Ph.D., professor in the Department of English, will be a featured panelist for the lecture, “Ecogrief and the Premodern Environment” on Dec. 15 at 1:45 p.m. The virtual event is presented by The Oecologies Research Cluster. Guests must register for the free event, which will also be recorded, and be available after it is completed.
Estes will speak about the elegiac Old English poem “The Seafarer” and discuss how to approach the phenomenon of ecogrief today. She will be joined by Chris Barrett, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University; Peter C. Remien, Ph.D., co-director of Oecologies and associate professor in the Division of Humanities at Lewis-Clark State College; and Kenna Olsen, Ph.D., co-director at Oecologies and professor and associate dean at Mount Royal University.
The panel will address the intensifying climate crisis and the need for “creating dialogues that consider approaches for articulating ecogrief and anxiety.” The panelists will present “understandings of, and cultural, textual, and literary approaches on, the articulation of ecogrief.”
Oecologies is a research cluster that gathers scholars from the humanities living and working along the North American Pacific coast to investigate the idea of “oecology,” an older spelling of the concept “ecology.” Their research asks what conceptual or metaphorical resources might help reorient our perceptions about ecological pasts, presents, and futures. With particular attention to the histories of imperialism and colonial exploitation, their research investigates the ecological, economic, and cultural relations among humans and nonhumans in the premodern world.