Dear colleagues,<\/p>\n
For its final session of the year, the Environmental Humanities seminar at LARCA<\/a> is pleased to host Thalia Field, who will be visiting professor at LARCA in autumn 2021.<\/p>\n Come and join us on June 24th at 5pm<\/strong> (CEST)<\/strong> for a conversation with <\/strong>Thalia Field<\/strong><\/a>and a presentation of her new collection of stories, Personhood<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the \u201cinvasive species crisis,\u201d Personhood<\/em><\/strong> reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard<\/em>, Thalia Field\u2019s essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status. Abigail Lang<\/a> is Associate Professor at Universit\u00e9 de Paris (LARCA), and the editor of the French translation of Bird Lovers, Backyard<\/em>: L\u2019amateur d\u2019oiseaux, c\u00f4t\u00e9 jardin<\/em><\/a>, (Presses du r\u00e9el).<\/p>\n Emma Thi\u00e9baut is a student at Universit\u00e9 de Paris and is currently writing her Master\u2019s thesis (M2) on the ethics of animal representation inWilliam Kotzwinkle\u2019s Doctor <\/em>Rat (1976), Ursula Le Guin\u2019s \u201cShr\u00f6dinger\u2019s Cat\u201d (1987) and Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals<\/em> (2016).<\/p>\n You can read \u201cHappy\/That you have the body (The Mirror Test)\u201d<\/a> on the Non Human Rights Project blog and learn more about their client Happy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nThe discussion will be led by Abigail Lang (LARCA, Universit\u00e9 de Paris) and Emma Thi\u00e9baut (Universit\u00e9 de Paris).<\/p>\n
\nPersonhood<\/em> <\/a>is Thalia Field<\/strong>‘s fourth collection with New Directions Press and follows Bird Lovers, Backyard<\/em><\/a> as an exploration of animal-human relations in narrative and language. Inquiry into our shared animal history also drives her novel Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction<\/em> <\/a>(Solid Objects) about the origins of animal experimentation in 19th century Paris, and the activists who tried to stop it. Her two previous collections of stories, Point and Line<\/em><\/a> and Incarnate : Story Material<\/em><\/a> (New Directions) explore the limits of selves and genres. Operatic in scope, ULULU (Clown Shrapnel)<\/em><\/a> (Coffee House Press) is a performance novel and a lyrical cultural biography of the archetypal seductress Lulu. Other books include Leave to Remain: Legends of Janus<\/em> (Dalkey Archive) and A Prank of Georges<\/em> (Essay Press), written in collaborations with French writer and translator Abigail Lang. Thalia Field is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University, where she mostly engages students in radically interdisciplinary approaches to artistic and creative social practice. http:\/\/www.thaliafield.com<\/a><\/p>\n