The Environment Forum with Patrick Whitmarsh | "Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science"

Patrick Whitmarsh is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at College of the Holy Cross where he teaches 20th- and 21st-century Anglo-American literature. His teaching and scholarship focus on literary treatments of the environment and ecocritical discourse, particularly with regard to the ongoing climate crisis and the broader geosocial context of the Anthropocene. His writing often addresses the relationship between the literary novel and popular genre writing, specifically varieties of speculative fiction (such as science fiction, weird fiction, and horror), and examines how humans shape, and are shaped by, forms of ecological, historical, and cultural knowledge. Whitmarsh is the author of "Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science," published as part of the Post*45 series at Stanford University Press. Excerpts from the book have appeared in Contemporary Literature and Modern Fiction Studies, and related materials are forthcoming in SAF: Studies in American Fiction and the MLA volume Teaching the Literature of Climate Change. Please note that this event is open to Harvard affiliates only and registration is required. This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.