91影视

We鈥檙e delighted to announce the relaunch of the 91影视's Environmental Humanities Network. The Network was established in 2019 to connect researchers across the university and beyond working from differing disciplinary perspectives on environmental questions, with special attention to the broad range of contributions from the arts, humanities and social sciences. In a time of intensifying nature and climate emergencies, the signal importance of understanding these crises as 鈥渁lso a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination鈥� (Amitav Ghosh) has never been clearer.

Our activities for Autumn 2026 include the following; all are welcome.

EHN Work in Progress Roundtable
Tuesday, 03 November 2026 | 12:00-13:00 | FAB5.49

An informal opportunity to share updates on work being done in the field by researchers from across the faculties, and to share ideas for future activities. Please feel free to bring lunch as well as points of discussion.

EHN Reading Group
Monday, 16 November 2026 | 15:00-16:00 | FAB3.29 (in-person only)

Throughout the academic year we aim to discuss fundamental and pressing questions emanating from the climate crisis. Through conversation spanning disciplines, the group aims to rethink the co-constitution of 'nature' and society, explore histories and futures of the Anthropocene, examine climate politics in light of multi-species relations, and assess questions of ecosystem habitability and sustainability in the current conjuncture.

For the first reading group session, we will be discussing three short chapters (Introduction, Chapter 5, Chapter 6) from Andreas Malm鈥檚 , which explores the dialectic of human-nature relations and problematizes notions of non-human agency.

Commodified, Energized, Botanized: Plants in the World-Ecology (Symposium)
Friday, 20 November 2026 | 12:00-17:00 | FAB5.49 and on

What can thinking with plants afford in a world ravaged by anthropogenic climate crisis? The history of the climate crisis is littered with plants hunted, studied, felled, hybridized, modified, mass-produced, circulated, reified, fossilized, and energized. Plants pollinate across and crack through borders of taxonomy, sexuality, space, ecosystem, temporality, and ontology. Apprehending these border crossings and cross-pollinations requires us, in turn, to cross disciplinary boundaries. Join us in an interdisciplinary symposium on the productive, post-productive, economic, aesthetic, and radical potential of plant life. If you wish to attend in person, register to book a free spot

Speakers:

James Palmer (Bristol) 鈥� 鈥溾��

Claudia Horn (King鈥檚 College) 鈥� 鈥溾��

Camilo Uribe Botta (Warwick) 鈥� 鈥淲hat Nineteenth-Century Orchids Can (and Can鈥檛) Teach Us鈥�

Moderator: Kalrav Vashishtha (Warwick)

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Dominic O鈥橩ey (Sheffield), 鈥淣adine Gordimer on Safari: Postcolonial Wildlife and the Environmental Humanities鈥�

Tuesday, 1 December 2026 | 16:00-17:30 | OC1.08 and on

How do postcolonial writers negotiate the colonial legacies of wildlife conservation? This paper offers an answer to this question by turning to Nadine Gordimer, a major figure of the postcolonial canon whose writing has often been read, at least within postcolonial ecocriticism, as plotting out conservation鈥檚 coloniality. Yet because these readings are undergirded by humanist frameworks of environmental justice, they tend to not only focus on a narrow corpus of Gordimer鈥檚 texts but also overlook the ways that her writing dramatises postcolonial multispecies relations. Turning, then, to some of Gordimer鈥檚 under-discussed works and archival materials, and focusing especially on her figuration of animals therein, this paper will suggest that her work comes to construe conservation as both a legacy of, and bulwark against, regimes of social and ecological violence.

Dominic O鈥橩ey researches how literary and cultural texts make sense of our relationships with animals. He is the author of (Bloomsbury, 2022) as well as other publications that track the species politics of wildlife conservation, mass extinction, museums, medical research, and factory farming. He is an Associate Editor at the open-access journal , and a Research Associate on the Wellcome Trust-funded project.