Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization: American Studies Institute at Seoul National University, South Korea
Contact email: jan@snu.ac.kr
CALL FOR PAPERS

The Task of Ecocriticism in the Age of American Empire

American Studies Institute, Seoul National University

Date of Conference: 25 – 26 August 2017

Location: Seoul National University, South Korea

Call for Papers Deadline: May 31, 2017

Since the 1990s, ecocriticism has grown into an interdisciplinary field of human sciences that moves beyond its earlier focus on natural habitat and nature writing to include ecofeminism, postcolonial ecocriticism, queer ecology, and urban/global ecology. In the age of the Anthropocene, in which humans are transforming the Earth’s life support systems, scholars working within and beyond ecocriticism are now facing a new double task: to understand human planetary impact on the one hand, and the ecological changes as a result of but also beyond the human on the other hand.

The American Studies Institute at Seoul National University invites papers that explore multiple intersections of ecological and global changes and human and non-human responses to them. What are the old and new questions and critical concerns that generate and sustain ecocriticism and globalism? What kind of impact can the ends of human ecologies and the problematic of the Anthropocene have in our globalized neoliberal capitalist world? How might we consider different spatial and temporal scales—i.e. local and global, center and periphery, urban and rural, present and future—in terms of the much longer history of the human exploitation of other humans and non-humans?

We invite submissions of abstracts (up to 300 words) and request a brief biography. Please send them to Jee Hyun An (jan@snu.ac.kr) by May 31, 2017.