Stacy Alaimo in Residence in October as Wang Distinguished Professor

From October 10-October 14, Professor Stacy Alaimo will be this year’s Wang Distinguished Professor in Residence.

Professor Stacy Alaimo
Wang Professor in Residence, October 2016

Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she established and directed a cross-disciplinary minor in environmental studies. Alaimo’s publications include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment book award for ecocriticism; and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016).

Stacy Alaimo, Exposed (2016)
Cover Art:

Marina Zurkow, “Slurb,” video still (2009)

She co-edited Material Feminisms (2008) with Susan J. Hekman and the forthcoming 30-chapter volume Matter (2016). Her next editing project will be co-editing a new series, “Elements,” with Nicole Starosielski, for Duke University Press. Alaimo has more than forty scholarly articles and chapters published and forthcoming on such topics as sustainability, gender and climate change, queer animals, anthropocene feminisms, marine science studies, blue humanities, material ecocriticism, and new materialist theory. Her work has been/is being translated into Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, and Greek. She is currently finishing the book Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss, and starting Liquid Carbon and other Unthinkable States, about how to conceptualize acidification and other threats to marine ecologies.

This visiting residency was created through a gift by Albert Wang and his family that has, since 2009, supported professors such as Edward P. Jones (now a member of the GW English Department), José Esteban Muñoz, J. Jack Halberstam, Michael Bérubé, and Simon Gikandi. The gift from the Wang family is one of the largest philanthropic commitments to GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English.

Alaimo Residency Main Events (locations and final details to be announced/watch our calendar on the right, as well as this blog, for updates)

Monday, October 10, 4:10-6 PM, Dean’s Conference Room, Phillips Hall 411:

Seminar for Students and Faculty with Stacy Alaimo. Readings for this event will be made available, although seating is limited. Please RSVP to Robert McRuer at rmcruer@gwu.edu to be placed on the list for this seminar.

Wednesday, October 12, 6:30-8 PM, Marvin Center 309:

GW Distinguished Lecture in Literary and Cultural Studies, “The Human after the Human: Material Ethics, Strange Agencies, and Posthuman Exposure”

Several potent movements in recent cultural theory, including posthumanism, inhumanism, new materialism, material feminism, and animal studies have implicitly or explicitly recast what it means to be human. Where does the human as subject or species find itself after this nonhuman turn in cultural theory? What do the new conceptions of the human mean for ethics, politics, and the humanities, and why might they matter for social justice, ecologies, and nonhuman lives? Alaimo will address these questions, considering new theories of epigenetics and the biocultural and suggesting the possibilities for inhabiting an insurgent sense of exposure within the anthropocene.

Thursday, October 13, 12:45-2 PM, Phillips Hall B156:

Seminar for Undergraduate Students with Stacy Alaimo. All undergraduate students are welcome at this event, although seating is limited. Please RSVP to Robert McRuer at rmcruer@gwu.edu to be placed on the list for this seminar and to receive a short reading for it.