Anthropocene and Animal Studies
The Anthropocene and Animal Studies working group is an affiliated working group. Affiliated working groups are coordinated and funded outside of the Department of English.
The Anthropocene and Animal Studies Reading Group assembles a diverse cohort of scholars, artists, and thinkers across a range of disciplines to interrogate the place of the human in a dynamic, uncertain, and multispecies world.
From the fungal to the elemental, the animal to the isotopic, this group trains a wide-angle lens on those creatures, things, and assemblages which constitute our unequally shared and never-just-human worlds. Our readings do not abandon the human altogether, but rather draw upon the urgency of the Anthropocene to examine the past, present, and future of humanity’s embeddedness within a complex relational web. We recognize the environment as a site for human domination of marginalized beings, as well as a space for pluralistic understandings of nature, and a horizon for imagining new cosmologies and social formations.
We are a nascent cohort (founded in 2014) that meets monthly to discuss critical texts, and seeks to feature a wide range of scholarly and artistic perspectives. Although the group is primarily a forum for graduate students in the humanities and related social sciences, all are welcome to join the conversation. For the 2021-2022 academic year, our regular programming is on hiatus. If you are interested in working with us or being added to the listserv, feel free to reach out to Jacob Myers (jamyers@sas.upenn.edu) or the Anthropocene Group email (pennthropocene@gmail.com) for more information.
Past Events
-
Environments of Modernity Conference
March 22, 2018 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm, March 23, 2018 - 9:00am to 6:30pm -
Environments of Modernity Conference
March 22, 2018 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm, March 23, 2018 - 9:00am to 6:30pm -
CANCELED
March 21, 2018 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm -
Discussion of Supriya Nair's Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours (2013)
February 21, 2018 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm -
Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (2013)
January 17, 2018 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm -
Kate Marshall, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013)
December 13, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm -
Melody Jue, "Vampire Squid Media," Grey Room (2014)
November 15, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm -
John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015)
October 18, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm -
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015)
September 20, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm -
Luce Irigaray & Michael Marder’s Through Vegetal Being
April 7, 2017 - 3:00pm to 5:00pm