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International Francqui Professor Chair 2024-25 - Prof. Ursula Heise (UCLA)

Prof. Ursula Heise is a Distinguished Professor and Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies at UCLA, where she teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

From September to December 2024, Prof. Heise will be a visiting professor at Ghent University’s Faculty of Arts and Philosophy.

www.francquifoundation.be

Inaugural Lecture

The inaugural lecture was delivered on Wednesday 2 October at 16:00 in the Belvedère of the Boekentoren  (Rozier 9, 9000 Ghent). 

Photography: Kitty van de Waart

Environmental Futures and the Challenges of Realist Storytelling

Environmental journalists, novelists, film-makers, and artists have traditionally preferred realist genres and styles to highlight the materiality and scientific grounding of environmental crises. Over the last twenty years, this convention has increasingly come into question. On the one hand, climate change, biodiversity loss, microplastics pollution, and other rapidly evolving ecological crises have diminished the relevance of stories and images focused primarily on individuals and families, particular places, and events that are commonly considered plausible. On the other hand, narrative themes and plots from speculative fiction have increasingly spread into environmental journalism and nonfiction. Concepts such as the “new normal,” the “New Weird,” and “hyperobject” have sought to capture this altered type of realism. This lecture will explore the controversies about what kinds of realism are appropriate and effective in environmental communication today. It will argue that the narrative strategies of speculative fiction, traditionally considered a secondary or minor genre mainly designed for entertainment, offer the most interesting foundations for thinking and talking about global environmental change: not because “science fiction is the realism of our time,” as the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has proposed, but because speculative fiction seeks to rethink and reshape common perceptions of the real from imagined futures.

Programme

16:00 - 17:30: Inaugural lecture

  • Welcome address by Prof. Gita Deneckere, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
  • Award of Francqui medal by Ms Greet T'Jonck, Secretary General of the Francqui Foundation
  • Introduction by Prof. Stef Craps, Department of Literary Studies
  • Inaugural lecture by Prof. Ursula Heise
  • Award of UGent medal by Prof. Rik Van de Walle, Rector of Ghent University

17:30 – 19:00:  Reception

Class of Excellence Seminars

Each of the seminars will start with an introductory lecture by Prof. Ursula Heise on the seminar theme.

All are welcome. For more information, please contact Prof. Stef Craps (stef.craps@ugent.be).

Roundtable: Encountering Environments: Classics and Ecocriticism

  • UGent, Thursday 14 November 2024, 17:00 - 18:45 (Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room; a Teams link will be circulated after 5 November 2024).
  • Participants: Ursula Heise (UCLA), Alison Sharrock (University of Manchester), Aaron Kachuck (UCLouvain) and Giulia Sissa (UCLA).
  • Organisers: Marco Formisano (UGent) and Leila Williamson (UGent).

In recent years ecocriticism has increasingly attracted the attention of an astonishingly wide range of classicists. It seems that Classics as an academic discipline, even within its more conservative scholarly traditions, has embraced the hermeneutic possibility offered by the consideration of the environment in ancient Greek and Latin texts. And yet, as the title of this event is meant to highlight, there is something disturbing in this encounter between the philological-historical discipline par excellence, Classics, and an environmental criticism that puts at the core of its investigation the more-than-human, thus insisting on the time of the environment rather than human history. Do we classicists feel the need to retrodate the advent of the Anthropocene to Greco-Roman antiquity in order to feel entitled to approach our texts in an ecocritical way? Or do we look for a literature of prefiguration or even allegory of our current environmental crisis? In any case, it seems that the emergence of environmental critical discourses in the study of the ancient Mediterranean world cannot be viewed as just another hermeneutic tool. Rather, ecocriticism represents a totalizing way of reading that might require a radical revision of the very principles ruling the discipline.

LW Research Day 2024: From Source to understanding

Ursula Heise will be giving a lecture on “Narrative and Interpretation” as part of the 4th LW Research Day.

  • Wednesday 27 November 2024
  • Ghent University Museum (GUM)

What is the role of interpretation in our journey from studying source material to scientific understanding? Indeed, that journey can never be devoid of interpretation, which, in many cases, serves as the quintessential bridge between source material and understanding, whether it pertains to a historical study based on ego documents, the archaeological perspective on the material culture of the past or the anthropological view of human behaviour. Not infrequently, interpretation itself becomes the object of research. For instance, translation scholars examine translation choices that result from interpretations. Literary and art scholars investigate works that themselves provide an interpretation of the world in which they originate and the world they create. Similarly, language itself reflects a particular understanding of the world in a historical and sociological sense, which linguists further explore. In times of digital humanities, the interpretation of (big) data by AI becomes not only conceivable but even the norm. What do interpretation and hermeneutics signify for our fields today? What constitutes a successful or legitimate interpretation, and what are the pitfalls of interpretation?

Closing Symposium: Imagining Environmental Futures

Keynote speakers: Ursula Heise (UCLA) and Mathias Thaler (University of Edinburgh).

  • Monday 9 December 2024,  13:00-20:30
  • Zaal Nick Ervinck, Zebrastraat 32, 9000 Ghent
  • Attendance is free, but registration is required (except for Context and Nuance students attending only the evening session)

Closing Symposium: Imagining Environmental FuturesThe impossibility of predicting with absolute certainty what the planet will look like in 2030, 2050, 2100, and beyond means that policymakers have to resort to a methodology known as “scenario planning”, which uses speculation to chart various possible courses of action within an uncertain future. This is not unlike what happens in literature and other artforms that provide us with imaginative and compelling visions of possible futures and explore the consequences of different actions and decisions.

This future orientation is generally associated with science fiction and speculative fiction, genres that often rely on exaggeration and hyperbole to expose the dangers of the present moment. However, literary realism can also engage with uncertain futurity, e.g. by describing characters’ anxieties or hopes as they struggle with personal and collective crises. Novels, short stories, and films can help us expand our thinking, develop our imagination, challenge our assumptions about the future, and create a sense of urgency around the need to act.

This symposium will ponder the contribution that literature and other artistic practices can make to “futures literacy”, an essential skill for individuals, organizations, and societies that seek to navigate a rapidly changing world and to create desirable futures for themselves and others. It will offer a platform to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about how the imagination can affect our perception of the environmental future, and how we can use artistic practices to influence policy and public opinion.

Programme

  • 13:00 - 14:15: Keynote lecture by Mathias Thaler (University of Edinburgh), “Estrangement on a Strange Planet” – chair: Marco Caracciolo
  • 14:15 - 14:45: Coffee break
  • 14:45 - 16.45: Paper presentations by UGent researchers – chair: Ben De Bruyn (UCLouvain)
    • Marco Caracciolo, “Mixed Feelings and Readerly Dynamics in Anthropocene Fiction”
    • Elly McCausland, “Slippery Bodies: On the Importance of Fish Tales”
    • Stefano Bellin, “Can We Imagine Alternative World-Ecologies? Literature and Environmental Imagination in the Age of Presentism”
    • Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and Christel Stalpaert, “Natural Contract Lab: Fabulating Resilient Rivers and Collective Stewardship”
  • 16:45 - 17:30: Light meal (sandwiches)
  • 17:30 - 18:45: Keynote lecture by Ursula Heise (UCLA), “Distant Pasts, Near Futures, and Speculative Narrative” – chair: Stef Craps
  • 19:00 - 20:30: Panel discussion with Ursula Heise, Mathias Thaler, and the students of the university-wide elective course Context and Nuance - chair: Stef Craps
Download a PDF copy of the symposium booklet, which includes the programme, abstracts, and bios.

For more information, contact Stef Craps (stef.craps@ugent.be) or Marco Caracciolo  (marco.caracciolo@ugent.be).

Faculty magazine 'Binnenstebuiten'

'Klimaatkwesties' is the central theme of the sixth issue of the faculty magazine Binnenstebuiten. 

Stef Craps interviewed Prof. Heise about her work and her visiting professorship.