This symposium invites scholars to share research on rewilding as a socio-ecological practice.
How should we understand rewilding as restorative or reparative but also as experimental or utopian? What pasts does rewilding seek to restore and what futures does it seek to create? How should we conceptualize rewilding in terms of the tensions between intervention and withdrawal, management and release? What forms of the human (or the Anthropos) are at stake in rewilding? What role does technology play in rewilding? How might we understand rewilding as a site of political struggle or geopolitical contestation? What meanings are at stake in wildness? What is the relation of wildness as a political category, implying willfulness or autonomy, and ecological justifications for rewilding related to resilience, functionality, complexity, and/or self-organization? How do cultural and literary forms shape rewilding practices? What are historical precedents for contemporary rewilding?
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Committee
Organizing committee:
- Tobias Menely (UC Davis, United States)
- Thomas Dutoit (Université de Lille, France)
- Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité, France)
- Valentine Alloing (Université Paris Cité, France)
Speakers
Tobias Menely
Tobias Menely is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the Chair of the Environmental Humanities Designated Emphasis and a recent winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching. Menely is the author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago 2015) and Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (Chicago 2021), which was awarded the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award. With Jesse Oak Taylor, he co-edited Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (Pennsylvania State, 2017). Menely’s essay, “‘The Present Obfuscation’: Cowper’s Task and the Time of Climate Change” (PMLA 127:3), was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Riley Parker Prize. He is currently writing a book about megafauna conflict and conservation in the Anthropocene. Tobias Menely is invited professor at Université Paris Cité in March 2025.
Conference Site
DAY 1:
Building: Olympe de Gouges
Floor: 8
Room: 830
When you arrive at the Bibliothèque Mitterrand station (line 14 or RER C), take Exit n°3 (also called “Rue Goscinny”). Go left on Avenue de France. When you see the “Honorine Boulangerie,” turn left. The building (with red windows) is in front of you.
To take the elevator, you need to leave an ID to the Security (ground floor) in exchange for a badge.
DAY 2:
Building: Halle aux Farines Building C
Floor: groundfloor
Room: 027 C
When you arrive at the Bibliothèque Mitterrand station, take Exit n°3 (also called “Rue Goscinny”). Go left on Avenue de France, take the second left (Rue des Grands Moulins), go straight, and take the footbridge that goes over a small park. When you reach the esplanade that is behind the park, La Halle aux Farines is the long building on your right.
Find Building C. The room in on the ground floor.
This event is made possible by the EMERGENCE IDEX funding for the project EchoLitUs / EcoHealthCultures: Ecologies and Health Humanities in the Literature and Culture of the Nineteenth-Century United States
