Events Schedule

The theme of this meeting is 'Dead Darwin', and our presenter is Dr Sarah Bezan. 

My talk will be an invitation to discuss and constructively respond to my book manuscript (abstract below). I will give a short overview of the project and mainly focus on the theoretical intervention I seek to make, and I will perhaps focus on one particular case study to illustrate my points. I look forward to seeing you there.

Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture makes a robust case for the vital necro-ecological agency of earthworms, snails, coral, fish, and fungi. Each the subject of a chapter, these organisms take centre stage in and through close readings of Neo-Victorian fiction, film, art, and poetics that creatively engage with Charles Darwin’s evolutionary thinking on death and decay. Inciting a radical reinterpretation of the principles of life, matter, and being in Darwin’s natural scientific oeuvre, this book challenges conventional ideas of evolutionary science since the Victorian period and reforms our understanding of the intellectual lineage of vitalist theory that followed in Darwin’s wake. As such, Dead Darwin outlines the potential of a posthumanist critique of Darwin’s decompositional thinking in order to illuminate the intertwining natural and social histories that inflect imminent (and ongoing) ecological crises. From the ruminative moulderings of worms to the playful eruption of mushroom caps, decomposition sets the stage for the unmaking of the human through the intimate, and often abundantly unknowable, interspecies relationship created in and through death.