2025 UCL Rabindranath Tagore Lecture | The Work of Literature in Times of Eco-Crisis

The lecture will explore how both material reality and our imaginative responses to it are shattered and rebuilt in the wake of experiencing sudden environmental traumas, such as earthquakes. Taking Italy’s seismic landscape as a focus, it will show how three major eco-traumas (the earthquakes of Messina-Reggio Calabria, 1908; Friuli, 1976; and L’Aquila, 2009) have been re-articulated in a set of contemporary narratives in order to make sense of the affective and memorial rubble they left behind.

ABOUT THE LECTURE SERIES
The UCL Rabindranath Tagore Lecture in Comparative Literature is delivered annually by a scholar of international distinction. It celebrates the poet, playwright, painter and musician Rabindranath Tagore, whose eminent figure looms large in the history of UCL, a university which he joined briefly, in 1878, to read law and which he left without a degree. One hundred forty years later, Tagore is widely hailed as a model of the radical spirit that informs comparative literature in an age of shifting global cultural and political constellations. Tagore’s heroic vision of world literature (visva bharati) opposes hate-mongering nationalism at every level. His celebration of artistic creativity as wasteful spending (bājē kharaca) seeks to preserve the exuberance of poetic invention across all fields of inquiry and takes the excitement of drama, poetry, song and painting into society – and into the classroom and the lecture theatre.

This lecture features as part of The Stampede for the Arts on a Heating Planet, a collaborative initiative taking place across UCL from 26–29 June 2025 to mark the arrival of THE HERDS in London. 

Jointly hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and the the School of European, Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS), with generous support from UCL Global Engagement.

Image (to the left above) © Stefania Orfanidou, 2019.