OSL Sustainable Humanities Lecture: Prof. David Sergeant

The OSL Sustainable Humanities research group invites you to a lecture by David Sergeant.

 

Date: 12 December 2024, 4-5:30

Location: Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 2-3, room 019

Registration via neh@ru.nl by December 10

For more information, please contact Professor Michael Boyden (michael.boyden@ru.nl)

‘The truth was, most biodiversity was redundant’: human and nonhuman relations during the sixth mass extinction

We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. As much as we know this, and know we need to change, and as much as we talk and think about such change, the extinctions roll on unabated. This lecture explores such issues through a reading of Ned Beauman’s award-winning 2022 novel, Venomous Lumpsucker, which apparently accepts the inevitability of human-driven extinctions while eviscerating the intellectual and emotional reasons we might have for caring about it.

David Sergeant is Professor of English Literature at the University of Plymouth. He is the author of The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Climate, Retreat and Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Kipling’s Art of Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2013), as well as three poetry collections and several essays in journals, including Novel, Genre and Twentieth-Century Literature.

 

The lecture will be introduced by Professor Michael Boyden (Nijmegen) and Dr Kari Driscoll (Utrecht) will act as the respondent.

 

Generous support comes from the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies and the Utrecht Network of Environmental Humanities.

 

The lecture is the culmination of the advanced course “Writing Extinction and the Planetary Turn,” organized by the OSL Sustainable Humanities group.

 

The event will be followed by drinks at Café Hofman.