Oecologies

Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia On 8 May 2020, Oecologies kicked off its year-long programming on “Sea.” Selected by Mo Pareles (UBC, English), our shared reading was Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s article “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” which appeared in GLQ in 2008. Over 20 international Oe scholars and affiliates…

As a scholarly organization that considers environmental and ecological issues within the premodern and early modern world, Oecologies is also fundamentally concerned with histories of imperialism and colonial exploitation, as well as with the coeval problems of white supremacy and racial inequality. The ongoing crisis of police violence and the murder of people of color,…

Sharon O’Dair, University of Alabama Some years ago, I published an essay in a forum on Shakespeare and Ecology, arguing that historical work in the early modern period could assist the science of ecology, a science that studies populations of organisms.1  The reason our historical work might assist the ecologists is that one significant problem…

Mo Pareles, University of British Columbia A lot of people I know and don’t know were irritated by an article by Jonathan Franzen, a famous non-expert, called “What If We Stopped Pretending?: The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.” You can read excellent rebuttals…

Martha Alexandra, University of California, Davis When people ask me what I write about, the short answer I usually give is “witches, witchy stuff.” Many times this is a sufficiently juicy response to satisfy someone that my work is interesting—witchiness and the occult are, as I’ve learned, “in”—but if they want to know more, the…