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International Francqui Professor 2024-25 Ursula Heise

Prof. dr. Ursula Heise bekleedt de Marcia H. Howard leerstoel in literatuurwetenschap aan UCLA, waar ze doceert aan het departement Engels en aan het Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Van september tot december 2024 is professor Heise gasthoogleraar aan onze faculteit.

www.francquifoundation.be

Inaugurele rede

De inaugurele rede vond plaats op woensdag 2 oktober om 16 uur in de Belvedère van de Boekentoren (Rozier 9, 9000 Gent).

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.

Programma

16.00 - 17.30 uur: Inaugurele lezing

  • Welkomstwoord door prof. dr. Gita Deneckere, decaan faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
  • Overhandiging Francqui medaille door mevr. Greet T'Jonck, secretaris-generaal Francqui-Stichting
  • Inleiding door prof. dr. Stef Craps, vakgroep Letterkunde
  • Inaugurele lezing prof. dr. Ursula Heise
  • Uitreiking UGent medaille door prof. dr. Rik Van de Walle, rector Universiteit Gent

17.30 - 19.00 uur : Receptie 

Class of Excellence Seminars

Elk van de seminars begint met een inleidende lezing door prof. dr. Ursula Heise over het thema van de bijeenkomst.

Iedereen is welkom. Voor meer informatie, contacteer prof. dr. Stef Craps (stef.craps@ugent.be).

Rondetafeldiscussie: Encountering Environments: Classics and Ecocriticism

  • UGent, donderdag 14 november 2024, 17u00 - 18u45 (Blandijnberg 2, Faculteitszaal; na 5 november wordt een Teamslink gedeeld).
  • Deelnemers: Ursula Heise (UCLA), Alison Sharrock (University of Manchester), Aaron Kachuck (UCLouvain) en Giulia Sissa (UCLA).
  • Organisatie: Marco Formisano (UGent) en 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.

Closing Symposium: Imagining Environmental Futures

UGent, maandag 9 december 2024, namiddag en avond.

Keynote sprekers: prof. dr. Ursula Heise (UCLA) en prof. dr. Mathias Thaler (Universiteit van Edinburgh).

Iedereen is welkom. Voor meer informatie, contacteer prof. dr. Stef Craps (stef.craps@ugent.be).

Faculteitsmagazine 'Binnenstebuiten'

'Klimaatkwesties' is het centrale thema van het zesde nummer van het faculteitsmagazine Binnenstebuiten.  
Stef Craps interviewde professor Heise over haar werk en haar gasthoogleraarschap.