Current Programme

We’re delighted to announce the relaunch of the University of Warwick's Environmental Humanities Network. The Network was established in 2019 to connect researchers across the university and beyond working from differing disciplinary perspectives on environmental questions, with special attention to the broad range of contributions from the arts, humanities and social sciences. In a time of intensifying nature and climate emergencies, the signal importance of understanding these crises as “also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Amitav Ghosh) has never been clearer.

Our activities for Autumn 2026 include the following; all are welcome.

EHN Work in Progress Roundtable
Tuesday, 03 November 2026 | 12:00-13:00 | FAB5.49

An informal opportunity to share updates on work being done in the field by researchers from across the faculties, and to share ideas for future activities. Please feel free to bring lunch as well as points of discussion.

EHN Reading Group
Monday, 16 November 2026 | 15:00-16:00 | FAB3.29 (in-person only)

Throughout the academic year we aim to discuss fundamental and pressing questions emanating from the climate crisis. Through conversation spanning disciplines, the group aims to rethink the co-constitution of 'nature' and society, explore histories and futures of the Anthropocene, examine climate politics in light of multi-species relations, and assess questions of ecosystem habitability and sustainability in the current conjuncture.

For the first reading group session, we will be discussing three short chapters (Introduction, Chapter 5, Chapter 6) from Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm, which explores the dialectic of human-nature relations and problematizes notions of non-human agency.

Commodified, Energized, Botanized: Plants in the World-Ecology (Symposium)
Friday, 20 November 2026 | 12:00-17:00 | FAB5.49 and on Teams

What can thinking with plants afford in a world ravaged by anthropogenic climate crisis? The history of the climate crisis is littered with plants hunted, studied, felled, hybridized, modified, mass-produced, circulated, reified, fossilized, and energized. Plants pollinate across and crack through borders of taxonomy, sexuality, space, ecosystem, temporality, and ontology. Apprehending these border crossings and cross-pollinations requires us, in turn, to cross disciplinary boundaries. Join us in an interdisciplinary symposium on the productive, post-productive, economic, aesthetic, and radical potential of plant life. If you wish to attend in person, register to book a free spot here.

Speakers:

James Palmer (Bristol) – “Power Plants? Biofuels, Vegetal Labour, and the Possibility of Post-Productive Energy CulturesLink opens in a new window”

Claudia Horn (King’s College) – “Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global PlantationLink opens in a new window”

Camilo Uribe Botta (Warwick) – “What Nineteenth-Century Orchids Can (and Can’t) Teach Us”

Discussant: Kalrav Vashishtha (Warwick)

Dominic O’Key (Cambridge), “Nadine Gordimer on Safari: Postcolonial Wildlife and the Environmental Humanities”
Tuesday, 1 December 2026 | 16:00-17:30 | OC1.08 and on Teams

Dominic O’Key’s research asks how literary and cultural texts make sense of our relationships with animals. He is the author of Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals (Bloomsbury, 2022) as well as other publications that track the species politics of wildlife conservation, mass extinction, museums, medical research, and factory farming. He is an Associate Editor at the open-access journal Humanimalia, and a Research Associate on the Wellcome Trust-funded Multispecies Mutualisms project.