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EVENT Jun 24
ABSTRACT Jan 31
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Before Earthrise: Global Imagining in Literature and Visual Culture, 1550-1968

Oxford, UK
Organization: Exeter College, University of Oxford
Categories: Postcolonial, Hispanic & Latino, Comparative, Popular Culture, Literary Theory, World Literatures, Early Modern & Renaissance, Long 18th Century, Romantics, Victorian, 20th & 21st Century, Aesthetics, Anthropology/Sociology, Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Film, TV, & Media, History, Philosophy, African & African Diasporas, Asian & Asian Diasporas, Australian Literature, Canadian Literature, Caribbean & Caribbean Diasporas, Indian Subcontinent, Eastern European, Mediterranean, Middle East, Native American, Scandinavian, Pacific Literature
Event Date: 2025-06-24 Abstract Due: 2025-01-31
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Keynote Speaker: Professor Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University)

In a time of planetary crisis, our understanding of the earth as a whole is a matter of ecological and geopolitical consequence. What extinguished worldviews might be salvaged from the past, and (how) can these historical imaginings invigorate new ways of thinking the global? This one-day interdisciplinary conference will explore the theme of global imagining in literature and visual culture of the “modern age,” from the Copernican revolution up to the “earthrise” photographs of the 1960s, which captured a view of the earth from outer space for the first time. Taking as its focal point the idea and image of the terrestrial globe, the conference aims to investigate how and why artists, writers, and other thinkers imagined the earth as a whole before the age of space travel and neoliberal globalisation. We will look to past literary and artistic methods of imagining, representing, and (re)configuring the terrestrial globe across multiple chronological and cultural contexts, shedding new light on the ideological and philosophical stakes of global imagining and reassessing contemporary conceptions of the global.

Paper Proposals

Proposals for contributions, in the form of 15-minute presentations, are welcomed from scholars at all career stages and across the humanities. Proposals may address the topic of “global imagining” in its broadest conception during the period 1550-1968.

Please submit 250-word paper proposals by 31 January 2025. Proposals can be sent via email to the conference organiser, Caroline Anjali Ritchie (caroline.ritchie@exeter.ox.ac.uk).
Please include a 50-word bio.

Possible Topics

  • Global apocalypse/catastrophe
  • Microcosms, macrocosms, scale
  • Utopian whole-earth imaginaries
  • Vernacular/popular global images
  • Cosmopolitanism/world citizenship
  • Decentering/provincialising Europe
  • Emblems, iconography, allegories
  • Science & poetic/artistic globes
  • Gender & global images
  • Three-dimensional globes
  • Circulation of global images
  • (Anti-)colonial global imagining
  • Speculative/imaginative globes
  • (Proto-)ecological worldviews
  • Aesthetics of global images
  • Poetic depictions of globes

https://tide.web.ox.ac.uk/event/earthrise

caroline.ritchie@exeter.ox.ac.uk

Caroline Anjali Ritchie