Departmental news

Divine Disasters: Exploring Distressed Landscapes in Literature and Theology

Conference Report

What happens when belief, the sacred and the divine collide with ecological crises? How do such distressed landscapes alter our ideas of the ecological and theological? The one-day interdisciplinary conference, Divine Disasters: Exploring Distressed Landscapes in Literature and Theology, set out to explore these questions at the University of Warwick on 24th February 2024.

This conference asked how art and literature depicted the role of the divine in disasters. During times of ecological crisis, some turn to religion for solace, while others feel their faith shaken. These dilemmas are unsurprising as the distressed landscapes of disasters are often places of multitudinous emotions, including fear, sadness, anxiety, anger, and hope, foregrounding theological queries of evil, doubt, and suffering. Literature and creative art often act as a site for exploring intersections between theological enquiries and ecological disasters. “Divine disasters” offers a new lens for examining the interrelationship between theology, ecology, and literature, questioning human vulnerability and theology’s big questions within narratives of distressed landscapes.

The conference welcomed 77 delegates, with 43 in-person attendees and a further 35 joining us online. The hybrid conference format made the event more accessible, facilitating a range of scholars from international institutions that enhanced the cross-discipline implications of Divine Disasters. In turn, the conference programme boasted presentations across diverse fields, including cultural studies, history, sociology, film, and media studies, to explore the conference theme in both imaged landscapes and real-world terms. 

Sadly, our keynote speaker, Prof. Patricia Murrieta-Flores, could not present her research on “Nepantla, between indigenous time and colonial space: Reflections about the end of the world in Central Mexico” due to illness. However, this schedule change allowed all delegates to participate in the two workshops initially planned to run concurrently. “Workshop A: Reading Ecopoetics in Divine Disasters”, facilitated by PhD candidates Ambika Raja, Nicola Hamer, and Lizzie Smith, opened the conference and invited discussions on poetry by Will Giles alongside visual art by Kaili Chun and Hongtao Zhou. In the afternoon, Catherine Greenwood from the University of Sheffield facilitated “Workshop B: Creating Responses to Divine Disasters” with Ruth-Anne Walbank, allowing delegates to write their responses to the conference theme through a series of free writing exercises and prompts from writing, including Catherine’s poetry, the Sura Qari’ah, and the Hopi Prophecies. While unexpected, the renewed focus on these interactive workshops rather than a single keynote decentred the conference’s didactic mode to refocus the event around discourse, exchange, and creativity, building a stronger feeling of academic community across the day.

The remainder of the conference encompassed six parallel panels from 17 researchers. In Room A, panels explored fictional representations of divine disasters, including ‘Dark Ecologies and Gothic Disasters’, ‘Deluge, Disaster, and Divine Deep Ecologies’, and ‘Remembering Disaster in Art and Culture’. The interdisciplinary scope of such fictional accounts enabled fresh comparisons between the mediums for imagining divine disasters, ranging from children’s animated films to Shakespeare’s plays. Meanwhile, the panels in Room B contemplated narratives from real-world disasters and the philosophical questions they raised, such as ‘Hope and Morality in the Face of Disaster’, ‘Divine Disasters and Religious Practice’, and ‘Extractions, Wastelands, and Human-made Disasters’. Papers on recent events such as the Chornobyl disaster and current topics like climate anxiety emphasised the relevance of “Divine Disasters” as an important critical lens for interpreting historic and contemporary distressed landscapes.

We would like to thank the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick for their support in funding the conference. Thanks to the high-quality papers from the 2024 conference, we hope to submit a book proposal to the Warwick Series in the Humanities to develop and share ‘Divine Disasters’ with wider academic communities.

Report by Ruth-Anne Walbank and Ambika Raja

March 2024

Congratulations to Professor Don Pollacco who has just been awarded £3 million from the ERC to develop a ‘digital telescope’ that will be capable of producing a highly sensitive continuous movie of the night sky.

Find out more.

Professor Giovanni Ricco has received a prestigious American Economic Journal Best Paper 2024 AwardLink opens in a new window for a paper published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

The awards are made annually to the best paper published in each of the four American Economic Journals – Applied Economics, Macroeconomics, Economic Policy and Microeconomics - in the previous three years.  The winning papers are chosen by the journals’ Boards of Editors from those nominated by AEA members.

Professor Ricco’s paper was published in 2021 and is co-authored with Professor Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

In The Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks Silvia Miranda-Agrippino and Giovanni Ricco study widely used instruments for the identification of monetary policy disturbances, show how the use of these instruments is behind the empirical puzzles reported in the literature, and propose a new high-frequency instrument for monetary policy shocks that accounts for informational rigidities.

Commenting on his award, Professor Ricco said it was a complete surprise but a very welcome one.

Head of Department Ben Lockwood said: “On behalf of all in Warwick Economics I’d like to congratulate Giovanni on his ‘best paper’ award. It is a significant achievement for him personally and an important accolade for the Department."

• The Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks Silvia Miranda-Agrippino and Giovanni Ricco, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2021, 13(3): 74–107. https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.20180124
• Full text versions of the four winning articles are available at https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/honors-awards/aej-best-papersLink opens in a new window.

In 2023, WMG at the University of Warwick, received a share of £19 million from the Faraday InstitutionLink opens in a new window - the UK’s flagship institute for electrochemical energy storage research. 

The funding was allocated to four key battery research projects aimed at delivering an impact for the UK. These existing projects across three different research areas - next generation cathode materials, electrode manufacturing and sodium-ion batteries - have been reshaped to focus on the areas with the greatest potential for success. 

WMG took a key role in two of the four, reshaped projects entitled FutureCat and Nextrode. FutureCat is now entering its second phase with Louis Piper, WMG’s Professor of Battery Innovation, appointed as the new Principal Investigator (PI). 

The battery cathode research project, focuses on understanding novel redox processes as a route to stabilise both high capacity, high performance, nickel rich and emerging cathodes and scalable designer morphologies. The next phase of the project will build on its success in developing reliable, scalable routes to deliver a longer lifetime, high-energy/power cathodes, essential for electric vehicles. 

Professor Louis Piper explains: "Professor Cussen's leadership on FutureCat has resulted in significant advancements in Ni-rich cathodes.  We are looking forward to continuing the pace of Ni-rich cathode innovation and development in phase II of the project.  I am pleased that she will still work closely with the team." 

James Gaade, Research Programme Director, commented: “We extend enormous thanks to Professor Serena Cussen for her engaging and collaborative leadership of the FutureCat project since its inception in 2019. In Professor Louis Piper the project has an accomplished research leader to take over the reins. WMG, University of Warwick has always been a key university partner for the Faraday Institution and is currently a member of five of our cross-disciplinary, multi-university battery research projects. We’re delighted to see the University becoming project lead for the first time.” 
 
Professor Serena Cussen, former Principal Investigator of FutureCat, commented: “It has been the greatest privilege to lead the UK Faraday Institution's consortium on next-generation cathodes, FutureCat, as principal investigator since its inception in 2019.  

“At the heart of our success has been a shared research vision and a culture of collaboration, which has seen our consortium deliver deep scientific insights on next-generation cathode discovery, development and scale-up as well as exciting partnerships with industry colleagues.

“While I am sad to leave the role of PI of FutureCat, I am delighted to see my friend and colleague Professor Louis Piper take over the leadership of this fantastic project. I have no doubt this is a project which will continue to go from strength-to-strength, and I look forward to collaborating with the FutureCat family of researchers. 

Read more about FutureCat here:  https://futurecat.ac.uk/

Professor Steven Brown, alongside co-authors Les Hughes and Helen Blade from AstraZeneca and Pat Szell (former post-doc at Warwick and AstraZeneca) have published in the Royal Society of Chemistry book entitled 'NMR Crystallography in Pharmaceutical Development.’

The University of Warwick will launch a new Computer Science programme with the Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics (NURE) this September. This announcement coincides with the second anniversary of the University of Warwick's official twinning with NURE (29 Mar). The full story is available hereLink opens in a new window.

Historical experience of battles fought with physically-demanding weapons created a preference for sons over daughters which persists to the present day, according to new research.

India’s population is disproportionately male compared to global norms. A preference for sons over daughters has resulted in some 63 million women “missing” from the population. While Amartya Sen drew attention to these “missing women” in the early 1990s, this deficit was recognized as early as the 1881 census.

While mechanisms such as sex-selective abortion and prioritising male children over female children can explain the imbalance, what is it that creates the preference for male children in the first place?

In a new Warwick Economics Research Papers (WERP) working paper, Conflict and Gender Norms, Mark Dincecco, James Fenske, Bishnupriya Gupta, and Anil Menon investigate whether exposure to conflict in India’s pre-colonial era, when battles were fought with physically demanding weapons such as bows and swords, created a preference for male children which still endures today.

The team geolocated battles and other conflicts between 1000 CE and 1757, when the Battle of Plassey established the dominance of the British East India Company, to create a measure of a location’s exposure to pre-colonial conflict.

This measure was compared to three measures of male-favouring gender norms: the sex ratio of the population; data on the sex of individual births; and the prevalence of crimes against women in early 21^st century.

The analysis found a robust positive relationship between conflict and male-favouring norms: districts that experienced greater exposure to pre-colonial conflict have more male-based sex ratios in the present-day population; and have a greater number of crimes against women.

But how is it possible for experiences from centuries ago to influence attitudes towards women today?

Folk tales and religious traditions can pass on cultural beliefs around gender norms and hand them down through generations. In Uttar Pradesh, researchers have recorded a number of folk songs denigrating the birth of a girl child and the women who birth them, for example:

“She gave birth to a male child – that’s why she is sitting on the bed: she is giving orders to everyone in the house.

If she had given birth to a female child, she would be sitting on the doorsill; she would have fallen from everyone’s eyes.”

Traditional songs in the eastern and southwestern areas of India are much less negative about women.

The researchers found positive relationships between exposure to conflict and folk tales with negative attitudes to women and exposure to conflict and a higher proportion of male temple gods; and exposure to conflict and a greater chance that women leave their home villages after marriage.

To test whether gender norms endure even if people migrate, the authors repeated the analysis using individuals’ mother tongue rather than geographic location, as the major languages of India typically reflect ancestry in specific regions. This analysis showed that male-favouring gender norms persist even after migration to areas that do not have historic exposure to conflict.

Commenting on the findings Professor Gupta said:

“Male-favouring gender norms are prevalent in many parts of the world today. They persist in India despite its recent economic growth, which is generally regarded as something which leads to more positive outcomes for women.

Our study provides new insights into the origins of these attitudes, focusing on the role of inter-state military rivalry and warfare.

The relationship which we have documented between exposure to conflict in pre-colonial times and cultural norms that favour men helps to explain why there is such variation in the proportion of missing women between different parts of India.

The evidence which we have found on the historical persistence of these attitudes also suggests that economic development alone may not resolve India’s gender inequality challenges.”

ENDS

· Mark Dincecco, James Fenske, Bishnupriya Gupta and Anil Menon (2024) Conflict and Gender NormsLink opens in a new window Warwick Economics Research Papers No. 1491

Joe Gillham (2nd year PhD student in Radiation Dense Materials) has been awarded the Best Student poster Prize at the 12th International Conference on the Science of Hard Materials (ICSHM12) in Sri Lanka.Link opens in a new window

The DCS hosted CS-ARC on the 22nd of March, with over 70 alumni coming to campus to reminisce and share their stories.

Student writers have produced creative non-fiction about Palestine, memoir about art as protest, and journalism about the right to health in response to the annual Lacuna Writing Competition’s call for short stories about human rights.