The Anthropocene, as a significant era of both geological and civilizational change, challenges traditional notions of corporeal integrity, wholeness, and immunity. The interdisciplinary workshop aims to explore specific instances of interplay between bodies, landscapes, and large-scale earthly transformations in literature, culture, and theory. In this way, we seek to examine the contemporary clash of scales as an ongoing negotiation of blurry bodies continuously changing into novel, yet to be theorized forms.

The workshop will take place in a hybrid format, you can participate in person or online via Zoom. Attendance is free.

Registration:

To participate in person, please send an e-mail to contact.anthropocene-network@univie.ac.at.

Workshop Schedule

10:00   Welcome and Introduction (Eva Horn, Nicole Sütterlin)

10:30   Eva Horn (University of Vienna) - Airy Bodies: The Hippocratic Tradition

11:45   Nicole Sütterlin (Harvard University) - Closure and Reopening: Conceptions of the Body from Humoral Pathology to Microbiome Research

13:00   Lunch Break

15:00   Vera Thomann (University of Vienna) - Literary Taxidermy and the Spectacle of Resurrection

16:15   Coffee Break

17:00   Gabriele Schwab (University of California, Irvine) - Precarious Boundaries: Reflections on Transspecies Imaginaries

18:15   Stacy Alaimo (University of Oregon) - Living Matters: Blurry Multispecies Bodies of the Anthropocene