Critical Conversations is the in-house faculty research series organized by the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures and the UBC English Graduate Student Caucus. The series aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across fields and periodization between students, faculty, and the larger UBC community. These events feature brief talks by speakers about their wide-ranging research expertise and interests, focalized through a particular critical topic.
“The Histories of Plants and Animals” is the first event in the 2023 Critical Conversations series. In this installment, Dr. Alexander Dick, Dr. Dallas Hunt, and Dr. Vin Nardizzi will discuss historical & literary entanglements with plant and animal interlocutors.
The in-person venue, Buchanan Tower Room 323, is wheelchair accessible. This event series is also available virtually via Zoom. Please indicate your attendance preference via the RSVP form linked below.
Light refreshments will be made available for in-person attendees.
Speakers
Alexander Dick
Alexander Dick (he/him/his) is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790-1830 (Palgrave 2013) and of many articles and chapters on literature, political economy, philosophy, and popular culture. He is currently pursuing research on the Highland Clearances and Romantic-era Scottish literary culture and on the coastal poetics of the eighteenth-century Hebrides.
Dallas Hunt
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. He has had creative and critical work published in the Malahat Review, Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. His teaching and research interests include Indigenous literatures, Indigenous theory & politics, Canadian literature, speculative fiction, settler colonial studies, and environmental justice. His children’s book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and his first collection of poetry, CREELAND, was published in 2022. His co-authored book, Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial, was the recipient of the 2021 Native American and Indigenous Studies Best Subsequent Book Award. Dallas’ newest collection, Teeth, will be published through Nightwood Editions in Spring of 2024.
Vin Nardizzi
Vin Nardizzi (he/him/his) teaches in Shakespeare and the Environmental Humanities. His first book is called Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. His forthcoming book is called Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance. He’s starting a new project on historical fiction and Elizabethan-ness. Ask him about The Bisley Boy.
