Tuesday, April 23, 6–7 p.m.
The Hecht Meeting Room, Neill Public Library
Downtown Pullman
There will be pastries!
Description:
At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, in his new book, The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894 (Edinburgh UP, 2024), Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants, and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decenter the human.
For this public lecture, McAuley will present an eco-feminist reading of Leonora Sansay’s Gothic novel set during the Haitian Revolution, Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808). According to McAuley, Sansay’s work establishes a troubling connection between the brutality of capitalism and evolutionary biology vis-à-vis women’s struggle for survival in a misogynistic plantation economy designed to satisfy the desires of European men.
Speaker bio:
Dr. Kirk McAuley is an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of English at WSU, and, in addition to various scholarly articles and chapters, he is the author of two books, including (most recently) The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), the research for which was supported by a 2015–16 Fulbright Scholarship at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, UK.
