This conference proposes to explore the concept of ecological grief and the fast-growing body of theoretical work that is developing around it against the background of the ongoing sixth-mass extinction and biodiversity loss. With this conference, we also wish to think about the longer history of ecological grief from the eighteenth century onwards, including by exploring some of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Is nature grievable? How do we grieve for it? What is the role of writers and artists in this individual and collective process? While to some, environmental grief gives way to desolation or an irredeemable sense of melancholy, others view it as a form of resilience or even a spur to action, a source of activism in art.

Programme

Day 1: Thursday 3 April 2025

HF 580F, Halle aux Farines, Université Paris Cité

9.00-9.10: Welcome and coffee/tea

9.15-9.30: Opening

9.30-10.45: Panel 1 – Reworking Elegy

Chair: Héloïse Lecomte (IHRIM)

• Montin Sarah (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France): ‘Eclogues in absentia: Preemptive elegies and anticipatory grief in contemporary anglophone poetry’ 
• Hamer Nicola (University of Warwick, UK): ‘Beyond elegy, or, towards a poetics of ecological grief’ 
• Vittonatto Silvia (University College London, UK): ‘Times of Grief: On the Temporality of Contemporary Ecological Elegies’ 

10.45-11.05: Coffee/tea break

11.05-12.00: Panel 2 – Staging Environmental Grief

Chair: Solange Ayache (INSPE Paris)

• Angelaki Vicky (Mid Sweden University, Sweden): ‘Imag(in)ing Grief:  Eco-Mourning Reframed in the Work of Caryl Churchill’ 
• Peghinelli Andrea (Sapienza – University of Rome, Italy): ‘“And can aught grieve save humanity?”: Fear and Grief for an Ecological Catastrophe in Modern and Contemporary Drama’

12.00-12.55: Panel 3 – Spectralities

Chair: Pr. Catherine Bernard (Université Paris Cité)

• Moore Sarah J. (University of Arizona, USA): ‘Mourning Trees: Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest’ 
• Morisson Valérie (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France): ‘Ec(h)omourning and transcorporeal un-mapping in Ailbhe Ní Bhrian’s works’

13.00-14.25: Lunch break

14.25-16.00: Panel 4 – Blue Ecological Grief

Chair: Pr. Bénédicte Meillon (Université d’Angers)

• Delaporte Marie-Laure (Université Paris Nanterre, France): ‘Between mourning and resilience: the figure of the mermaid as blue ecofeminism in the arts’ 
• Fecteau Maxime (Université du Québec, Montréal, Canada): ‘“In the Middle of Everywhere’: Sylvia Earle and the Articulation of Blue Grief’
• Raja Ambika (University of Warwick, UK): ‘Battling extinction of non-human kin: A comparative reading of Solastalgia in world-literary fiction’ 
• Botelho Teresa (Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal) ‘Grieving on Toxic Waters: Writing the Common Vulnerability of Human and More-than-human Lives in Twenty-First Century American Literature’ 

16.00-16.20: Coffee/tea break

16.20-17.20: Keynote lecture

• Stef Craps (Ghent University, Belgium) ‘Ecological Apologies: Reckoning with Grief, Guilt, and Multispecies Justice’

Day 2: Friday 4 April 2025

Room 1021, Bâtiment Sophie Germain, Université Paris Cité, Pl. Aurélie Nemours

9.15-10.30: Panel 5 – Mourning Trees

Chair: Pr. Sarah J. Moore (University of Arizona)

• Leblond Diane (Université de Lorraine, Metz, France): ‘Ghostly trees, bones and butterflies mourning a more-than-human world: Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees (2021), towards a hauntology of living things’ 
• Bronner Irène (University of Johannesburg, South Africa): ‘Tamara Kostianovsky’s Tree Stumps’ (online)
• Birat Kathie (Université de Lorraine, Metz, France): ‘Resistant Mourning: Fictional representations of environmental loss’ 

10.30-10.50: Coffee/tea break

10.50-12.05: Panel 6 – Indigenous Experiences of Environmental Grief

Chair: Robert Ivermee (ICP)

• Apospori Fani (University of Edinburgh, UK): ‘To get to this tomb take a canoe’ 
• Wieczorek Paula (University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów, Poland): ‘Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Ghostly Forms in Indigenous Speculative Fiction’ 
• Ziavra Elpida (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece): ‘The Writing of the Ecological Disaster: Mourning the Ungrievable in 21st Century Anishinaabe-Canadian Poetry and Visual Arts’ 

12.05-14.00: Lunch break

14.00-15.00: Panel 7 – Ecological Grief, Affect and Melancholy

Chair: Pr. Sara Thornton (Université Paris Cité)

• Carlill Alice (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK): ‘Living the ‘“barely bearable”’: Ecological Grief and Depression in Weather and The High House’ 
• Ishchenko Anna (Linnaeus University, Sweden): ‘Towards Environmental Melancholy in Narrative Video Games’ 

15.00-15.20: Coffee/tea break

15.20-16.35: Panel 8 – Extinctions

Chair: Pr. Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité)

• Becard-Goulet Sara (Utrecht University, Netherlands) and Ferwerda Susanne (Utrecht University, Netherlands): ‘Tracing Extinction in Australia: Artistic Attunements to Vanished Species’ 
• Benson Alex (Bard College, USA): ‘Extinction and Enjambment’ 
• Šlapkauskaute Rūta (Vilnius University, Lithuania): ‘Funny Bones: The Commedification of Extinction in Chris Flynn’s Mammoth’ 

16.35-16.45: Closing remarks and end of the Conference

Organising committee

• Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon/IHRIM)
• Estelle Murail (ICP/ECHELLES)
• Laura Ouillon (Université Paris Cité/ECHELLES)

With the support of

• ECHELLES – UMR 8264, 
• Institut Catholique de Paris, 
• IHRIM (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités – CNRS UMR 5317) 
• SEAC (Société d’Etudes Anglaises Contemporaines / Society of Contemporary British Studies)