Victorian Apocalypse: The siècle at its fin, Extraction Ecologies: A Roundtable

Location: Royce Hall 314 & online via Zoom

–Organized by Joseph Bristow (University of California, Los Angeles), Neil Hultgren (California State University, Long Beach), and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (University of California, Davis)

This will be a hybrid event, taking place in-person and online simultaneously:

Option A:
If you wish to attend in-person, please fill out the booking form below.
In accordance with the current mandate from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, all attendees, regardless of vaccination status, will be required to wear masks indoors (children under age 2 are exempt). Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals may go without masks outdoors.

Option B:
If you prefer to attend online via Zoom, please register at this link:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEofuCvrD8tGdAzZEwJg0gh-yaEA3DmduQl

Option C:
We will livestream the event on our YouTube Channel, and the recording will be available for two weeks.

N.B. You will not be able to pose questions to the roundtable from YouTube, but questions will be taken on Zoom.

During the 2021–22 academic year, the UCLA Center for 17^th– & 18^th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library will host the Core Program entitled “Victorian Apocalypse: The siècle at Its fin.” This program of lectures and presentations aims to reassess the ways in which the 1890s in particular as an era has strong associations with theories of decadence, degeneration, and disease. “Victorian Apocalypse” will draw attention to the significance of UCLA’s unrivaled collections relating to the 1890s, especially the life and work of Oscar Wilde, which are held at the Clark Library.

In The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (2019), Cara New Daggett identifies the Victorian era as the beginning of the “ideational” Anthropocene, a “dawning consciousness” that human-industrial impacts “might be planetary and truly catastrophic.” This roundtable showcases new approaches to Victorian literature and culture that address this rising sense of the inseparability of the social and natural worlds. In dialogue with Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s new book Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021), the scholars on this panel reexamine the Victorian period through the lenses of climate change, infrastructure studies, and the energy humanities, focusing on the socio-ecological impacts of extraction and industry in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Panelists:
Moderator – Neil Hultgren, California State University, Long Beach
Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California
Nathan K. Hensley, Georgetown University
Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside
Respondent – Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis

Image: Black Country Landscape by Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950), Wolverhampton Art Gallery. https://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/ebb/