Death Denial, Human Supremacy and the Ecological Crisis
Speaker: Scott Slovic｜Senior Scientist, Decision Research Center, Oregon Research Institute｜Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Environmental Humanities, University of Idaho
Host: Shiuhhuah Serena Chou｜Associate Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica
Moderator: Li-hsin Hsu｜Professor, Department of English, National Chenchi University
Time: January 18, 2027 (Mon.) 14:30~16:30
Venue: 1F, Conference Room, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica｜Google Meet
Registration: Click here to sign up. ※ Due to limited seating, registration is capped at 30 participants. The organizers reserve the right to review and approve all registrations.
Abstract
Ecocritics and other environmental humanities scholars have long been attuned to the background crisis rate—some would argue, in fact, that ecocriticism emerged as a discipline because of the perception of environmental crises in the 1970s and 1980s. But how have ecocritics responded to the serious disasters in recent years that seem to herald the emergence of a mega-disaster, a catastrophe akin to the sudden increase in extinction rate from a background (“normal”) rate to a mass extinction? In this talk I will discuss several recent scholarly collections—Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Context (2023), Ecocritical Exploration of the Climate Crisis—Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability (2025), and Imagining Ecocatastrophe: Reading Literary and Cultural Texts in the Global Context (2025)—that explore what ecocriticism might be able to do as a form of crisis response and what ecocriticism is simply not well suited to accomplish. A particular focus of this presentation will be the differences between ecocritical approaches to crisis in the Global South and the Global North.
Speaker's Short Biography
Scott Slovic is a senior research scientist at the Oregon Research Institute and distinguished professor of environmental humanities emeritus at the University of Idaho, USA. He served as founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in the early 1990s and was the editor-in-chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment for twenty-five years. The author, editor, and coeditor of more than thirty books, his forthcoming books include Chinese Ecocriticism: Toward an Ecological Civilization (Springer Nature, 2026; coedited with Lifu Jiang) and Chromatic Ecologies: Entangled Natures through the Colour Turn (Bloomsbury, 2027; coedited with Nikoleta Zampaki and Peggy Karpouzou).