THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED AT A LATER DATE. EMAIL CHRISTENE D’ANCA FOR MORE INFORMATION (christene_danca@ucsb.edu)

As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research has invited scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the arts.

Originally coined by Dan Bloom, Climate-Fiction, popularly known as Cli-Fi, is a type of fiction that explores what the earth might become if climate change continues at its current rate, and specifically if humans do not intervene to save the planet.

As many successful authors, such as Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula Le Guin, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, and Leslie Marmon Silko, have contributed to promulgating the topics of climate change and global warming into the public eye, Cli-Fi has gained prominence as more than a fringe genre.

Join us on April 18-19, 2020 from 10 a.m. each day in the McCune Conference room, for a robust exploration of what constitutes Climate Fiction today.

Keynote presenter, John Shoptaw, has been writing about and teaching ecopoetry and ecopoetics in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Currently, he is exploring the ecopoetics and ecopoetry of climate change. His most recent publication is a climate fiction, titled “Whoa!” that is a retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 2), in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. Among his other publications, is Time’s Beach, a collection of poems that evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed, and On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, a study of Ashbery’s poems through the form of a flow chart.

Sponsored by the Graduate Center for Literary Research