Launch of the Anthropocene Issue of The Journal of Beckett Studies
A seminar by Prof Eve Patten (School of English, TLRH) and Prof Clare Kelly (School of Medicine, TCD) as part of the School of Creative Arts Research Forum.
The Anthropocene may have been ruled out as a geological epoch this year; yet, one can only observe that the number and magnitude of ecological disasters have not lessened. At the minimum, the Anthropocene remains a useful concept to address the radical ecological event that is ongoing and the core question of respons-ability.
Between the urgency and emergency of responding to local manifestations of the Anthropocene and the long temporalities of scientific paradigmatic shifts, the arts and humanities carve out a space for telling and connecting those stories; articulating their complex geneses, histories and geographies; and addressing them with care and compassion by centring on life, and the loss thereof.
Irish artist Samuel Beckett (1906–89) responded creatively to the drastic ecological changes occurring in his own lifetime: his artistic legacy now constitutes a fertile ground for contemporary thinkers, artists and scholars to grapple with the anthropos in the room. It is the task that the collaborators who worked on the Anthropocene Issue (33.1) of The Journal of Beckett Studies set for themselves. This issue edited by Céline Thobois-Gupta, Amanda Dennis, Douglas Atkinson and Nicholas Johnson features articles on the Anthropocene in connection with (but not limited to) the temporality of ecological catastrophe, disability, Covid-19, ecocriticism, phenomenology and postcolonialism.
Join us on Monday 25 November at 10.00 am in the Trinity Long Room Hub for the launch of this special issue to hear more about the Anthropocene from an interdisciplinary range of experts. After an introduction of the project from the editors, Prof Eve Patten will share her insights on Beckett and Anthropocene Studies at Trinity College Dublin, and Dr Clare Kelly will offer remarks on the journal from the lens of interdisciplinarity.
Eve Patten is Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. A scholar in modern Irish and British literature and cultural history, she is editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and author of a book about Ireland’s revolutionary decade in English writing, Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is co-PI, with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, on the Ireland’s Border Culture project (funded by the HEA Shared Island programme), a digital archive of border-related literature and visual art.
Clare Kelly is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, and Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (https://immalab.wordpress.com/). Clare is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist whose focus has broadened to include teaching, research, and advocacy on the climate and biodiversity crisis. She recently co-authored the paper “Rethinking Academia in a Time of Climate Crisis” (https://elifesciences.org/articles/84991), which argues that academic culture acts as a barrier to climate action. Inspired by Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics (https://doughnuteconomics.org/), the paper proposes seven ways to reimagine academia so that it works better for people and enables climate action.
Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: weiyi@tcd.ie