Conference "The Earth Remembers: Environment and Memory in Literature"

As Super El Niño exacerbated global warming in the summer of 2026, in Europe the depleting Danube revealed the traces of World War II in the form of Nazi warships, still residing at the bottom of the central water artery of the continent. In another part of Europe, the blowing up of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine in 2023 unleashed the residue from World War II and the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, carried by the flood of Kherson into the Black Sea, which thus became newly legible as an archive of political disasters and their environmental consequences. In 2026, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has issued a Call for Input on Environmental Destruction and its Human Rights Impacts in Gaza both before and after October 2023. The recent siege of the Strait of Hormuz has revealed geopolitical scars and economic uncertainty, while leaving the precariousness of the ecosystem of the strait itself outside major conversations. All these contexts signal the entanglement of environmental harm with violent histories and their memory, producing a vision of the Anthropocene as “the story of how people treat the environment and how people treat each other” (Lewis and Maslin; Mentz).

This conference brings together ecocriticism, environmental humanities and memory studies to explore the many ways in which the questions of environment and memory intersect in literatures of the past and present. Ecocriticism’s interest in how literature can give form to expanded temporal and spatial scales of environmental transformations such as climate change, species extinction, and toxic drift has always implicitly included the questions of memory. However, if cultural memory has for a long time been theorised anthropocentrically as selective and politically determined, environments as “ghost habitats” (Mabey) may serve as archives and potential witnesses to the Wasteocene (Armiero), an era of toxic residue, slow violence (Nixon) and social injustice, which is characterised by contaminating substances as much as by contaminating narratives that hierarchise or erase memories of environmental destruction. Against this background, literature has a viable role in unsilencing entangled memories and vulnerabilities, as well as bringing together human and nonhuman scales.

Our conference will ask how landscapes, places, water bodies, species, weather, material environments, and ecological processes function not merely as settings or metaphors but as active agents in the production, transformation and preservation of memory. Conversely, it also considers how cultural memories shape perceptions of environments, determine what forms of environmental loss become visible or memorable, and influence the ways communities imagine ecological futures in the processes of proleptic or anticipatory remembering (Colebrook, Craps). We invite contributions that consider how different literary forms and genres can make perceptible temporalities and scales of environmental change that exceed human experience, and reshape our understanding of place, responsibility, belonging, and planetary futures.

Special stream: Ecocide and environmental impact of historical violence

This special stream within the larger conference explores more specifically the questions of literary engagement with ecocide and the environmental impact of war, occupation, genocide, colonialism and other forms of historical violence. How do contemporary literatures represent the entanglement of violent histories and environmental change? We are particularly interested in the relationship between historically concentrated forms of violence such as war, genocide, and occupation, and slow violence – environmental destruction whose effects unfold gradually across generations. Colonialism, imperialism, and extraction may produce environmental legacies that extend far beyond the historical events through which they are conventionally remembered. We particularly encourage transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches that bring different (postcolonial) literatures, histories, geographical contexts, languages, and theoretical perspectives into dialogue.

Call for Papers

We welcome papers exploring these and other aspects of memory and environment in literature:

• Human, non-human, and more-than-human memories
• Temporal and spatial scales of environmental memories

   o human and more-than-human temporalities
   o local, regional, national, transnational, and planetary scales
   o relations between individual experience and large-scale environmental transformation

• Transcorporeality and material interdependence
• Animals, plants, water, soil, and other more-than-human agents of memory
• Embodied and differential experiences of environmental change
• Intergenerational and delayed environmental effects
• Rethinking the human subject and its relationship to the past through environmental relations
• Ecocide and the environmental impact of historical violence in war, occupation, genocide, colonialism, and imperialism
• Environmental (in)justice, indigenous environmentalism, decolonial ecocriticism
• Environmental impact of industrialisation, extractivism, plantation economy, pollution, etc.
• The intersection of event-centred violence and slow violence
• The representation of the environmental impact of contemporary wars and genocide
• Literary forms (genres, tropes, narrative perspectives) and formal experimentation in ecocriticism
• Mimetic, a- or anti-mimetic literary approaches to memory and the environment
• Ecolinguistics, ecostylistics and cognitive literary studies
• Ethics, justice, and environmental memory
• Forms of critique and hope in literatures of environmental memory

We welcome contributions from literary studies, memory studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, area studies, and related fields.

Keynote Speakers

• Anna Barcz, T. Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences
• Rob Nixon, Princeton University
• Hanna Teichler, Goethe University Frankfurt

Please submit your paper and panel proposals by 15 January 2027 to the following e-mail address: earthremembers@tlu.ee. For paper proposals please submit an abstract (max 300 words) and a short bio. For the panel: the panel description (max 300 words), the abstracts for 3–4 papers (max 300 words each) and the bios of the presenters. Acceptance notice will be sent by 15 February 2027.

The conference is organised by the project “Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational Literatures” (led by Eneken Laanes, Estonian Research Council, 2025–2029) in collaboration with the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature and the working group of Literature and Memory of Memory Studies Association.