Enmeshed bodies: thinking, writing, and feeling (through) climate change and the Anthropocene

The ongoing environmental crisis reveals a profound interdependence between environmental transformation and the bodies of human and nonhuman life, placing sustained pressure on established ways of thinking, feeling, and inhabiting the world.

This conversation will explore how climate change is experienced, mediated, and represented at the level of embodiment. Bringing together perspectives from literature, environmental humanities, and cultural studies, it will reflect on the place of human and nonhuman bodies within ecological crisis, forms of interconnectedness, and the role of literature and literary criticism in imagining more ecologically attuned ways of living.

About the speakers:

Daisy Hildyard is a novelist and essay writer. Her novels, Hunters in the Snow and Emergency respectively won the Somerset Maugham Award, a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards, and the RSL Encore Award in 2023. Her essay The Second Body, which explores the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life in the context of ecological crisis, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.

Professor Heather Houser’s work explores the intersections of environment, science, and contemporary U.S. culture. She is currently completing a new book, Our Bodies, Our Climate, which examines reproduction in relation to the climate crisis. Her previous publications include Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data (2020) and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014). Her writing has appeared in a range of academic and public-facing publications, including Critical Inquiry and Sierra Magazine. Following fourteen years at the University of Texas, Austin, she recently joined the University of Antwerp as Full Professor of Literature.

Francesca Balestro is a PhD candidate based in SELCS at UCL. Her research focuses on literary representations of the ecological crisis in everyday life across Anglophone, Italophone, and Francophone literature.