Date: Saturday, April 11, 2026
Please join us on Saturday, April 11 for Endnotes 2026: Environment, Extraction, Evolution. Endnotes is the annual graduate conference of the Department of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Our 2026 conference will feature a keynote speech by Dr. Alexander Dick (Associate Professor, UBC) entitled “Coastal Poetics and the Politics of Infrastructure: Walter Scott’s Lord of the Isles.”
The 2026 Endnotes Conference will take place on the UBC Vancouver Point Grey Campus in Buchanan Tower (BUTO) Room 323. Those unable to attend in person may register to attend via Zoom using this link. This event is free to attend.
Event Schedule (Tentative)
8-8:30: Registration and Coffee
8:45-9: Opening Remarks
9-10:15: Renewing Literary Landscapes
– Nightfall on the Island of Despair: Candles and Nocturnalization in Robinson Crusoe (Graham Richards, UBC)
– “But It’s Our Land”: Ownership and Extraction on the Great Plains in The Grapes of Wrath (Maebh Richards, West Virginia University)
– Destabilising Anthropocentrism through Sensing Ecology in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (Madeline Isabella Harding, UBC)
– All that Grows: Agriculture and Colonial Racialization in Othello (Ashley Smith, UBC)
10:30-11:45: Visualizing Extraction
– Nothing More to Feed Upon: Minerva Cuevas’ Seascapes in the Uncanny Capitalocene (Oli Beeby Maglaque, UBC)
– Time-scapes of Oil: Considering Warren Cariou’s Petrographs as Time-Travelling Devices (Kalli McIver, UBC)
– Landscape Without Lens: Cameraless Ecocinema and Immanent Landscapes in Geographies of Solitude (James DeLisio, USC)
– Passing Through Blackness: Vestibular Labor and Extractive Incorporation in Eve and the Fire Horse (Zichen Liang, UBC)
11:45-12:30: Keynote – Coastal Poetics and the Politics of Infrastructure: Walter Scott’s Lord of the Isles (Dr. Alexander Dick, Associate Professor, UBC)
12:30-1:15: Lunch Break
1:20 – 2:00: Film Showcase and Discussion
– The Stratigraphic Turn: Vertical Historiography in Vertical Remains (2025) (Aadi Bhandari, UBC)
– Entangled Edges: Multispecies Encounters at the Urban-Agricultural Margins (film: In-between Flights, 2024) (Heige Kim, Concordia University)
2:15-3:10: Pedagogy and Subjectivity
– The Evolution of the Educational Subject in AI-Supported Art Education: Insights from the Canadian and Chinese Contexts (Zhuqing Mei, UBC)
– Language, Labor, and Global Higher Education (Ridita Mizan, Illinois State University)
– Quantum Mechanics at the Frontier and in Retrospect: Rhetorical Hidden Variables (Fiona Thompson, University of Waterloo)
3:25-4:15: Boundaries of the Body
– Sogolon’s Hybrid Body: Power, Oppression, and the More-than-Human (Giulia Berti, University of London)
– Rooted Bodies, Extracted Lands: Frida Kahlo and the Ecology of Pain (Zahra Moosavi, Western University)
– Extraction, Managed Bodies, and Zones of Exclusion in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Sushmindar Jeet Kaur, GGN Khalsa College)
4:30-5:45: (Re)naming Violent Taxonomies
– Where Bodies Became Bark: Khejarli and the Poetics of Environmental Resistance (Khushi Khandelwal, Government College Sapotra)
– Before the Anthropocene: Famine, Agrarian Extraction, and Political Violence in Colonial Bengal (Debalina Das, Panchla Mahavidyalaya)
– Against Extractive Legibility: Environment and Black Diasporic Poetics in The Dyzgraphxst (Sai Rathakrishna, York University)
– Exploring Literary Depictions of Environmental Injustice in the Niyamgiri Hills Mining Conflicts: An In-depth Political Ecological Analysis (Dr. Shreyansh Jain, Christ University)
5:50-6:00: Closing Remarks
Endnotes 2026 is held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) People. We thank the Musqueam Nation for hosting us on their territories, which have long been and continue to be a place of teaching and learning for the Musqueam people. We encourage you to learn more about the Musqueam First Nation and its ongoing land governance initiatives. Likewise, we encourage you to learn more about the University of British Columbia’s relationship with both the land and the Musqueam Nation.
If you have any questions, please email endnotesconference@gmail.com
