Arts of Memory and Mourning in the Anthropocene: Masterclass and Lecture with Prof. Stef Craps

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Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University) will visit Radboud University Nijmegen on 4–5 November 2025 to give a masterclass for PhD and ReMA students and a public lecture followed by a roundtable. The events will explore how cultural works engage with ecological forgetting, grief, and guilt.

 

Masterclass for PhD and ReMA Students ‘Confronting Amnesia, Practising Mourning: Cultural Responses to Environmental Loss’

 

Date and time: Tuesday 4 November 2025, 16:00-17:30

Venue: Radboud University Nijmegen, exact location T.B.A.

 

This masterclass invites students to reflect on the role of the arts in negotiating the affective and mnemonic dimensions of ecological crisis.

 

We will discuss two short, complementary essays by Stef Craps: “Remembering Earth: Countering Planetary Amnesia through the Creative Arts” (pdf), which examines how cultural works can resist environmental generational amnesia and the shifting of ecological baselines, and “Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene” (pdf), which considers how artistic practices can help communities acknowledge and work through grief for more-than-human losses.

 

Read together, these texts illuminate how art can address both the erosion of memory and the burden of grief, showing its potential to counteract cultural denial, foster ecological responsibility, and keep possibilities for liveable futures open.

 

Participants must register in advance. They are expected to read both essays beforehand and to submit one written question or comment in response to them, which will serve as a basis for discussion.

 

Students applying via OSL can earn 1EC for attending the masterclass and meeting the following requirements:

  • Sign up for this class by sending an email to Laszlo Muntean (muntean@ru.nl)
  • Submit a question pertaining to each of the readings (that is, two questions in total) a week before the class (midnight, October 28)and send it to Laszlo Muntean.
  • Write an 800-1000-word reflection on the class (midnight, November 11) and send it to Laszlo Muntean.

 

 

Public Lecture and Roundtable ‘Ecological Apologies: Reckoning with Grief, Guilt, and Multispecies Justice’

 

Date and time: Wednesday 5 November 2025, 14:00–15:30

Venue: Radboud University Nijmegen, exact location T.B.A.

 

This lecture examines the emerging phenomenon of ecological apologies through the lens of British artist Marcus Coates’s Apology to the Great Auk, a short film documenting an official apology to an extinct bird. While the project falls short of conventional criteria for a successful apology, it nonetheless raises important questions about the role of grief, guilt, and responsibility in the context of anthropogenic species loss.

 

Drawing on frameworks from memory studies, transitional justice, and prefigurative politics, the lecture considers what ecological apologies might contribute to widening our moral and political imagination, cultivating care across species boundaries, and envisaging more just multispecies futures.

 

The lecture will be followed by a roundtable discussion and Q&A.

 

Registration for the lecture will soon be available.

 

 

Bio

Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research explores how literature and culture engage with histories of political and ecological violence, drawing on memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory.

Notable publications include Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013), Trauma (2020, co-authored), and Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (2017, co-edited), as well as guest-edited special journal issues on topics such as climate witnessing, ecological grief, and transcultural Holocaust memory.

Craps’s current work focuses on ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process, examining how aesthetic practices can register slow violence, metabolize grief, and cultivate forms of care and responsibility that extend beyond the human.

He is the founding coordinator of Mnemonics, an international network for doctoral training in memory studies, and serves on the board of Climate Justice for Rosa, a non-profit advocacy group set up in memory of a teenager who drowned in the European floods of 2021.