Agenda

Mark Algee-Hewitt
Stanford University

Abstract:
An emerging genre of the novel, Climate fiction, or CliFi, brings together fictional worlds and real-world facts to address one of the most urgent challenges of our time. Taking human-caused climate change as their primary focus, CliFi novels present a mixture of facts and hypothetical scenarios, often disasters, to readers, many of whom are skeptical of climate change. The public reaction to these novels have demonstrated again how fiction can be more effecting in communicating scientific realities than even the best intentioned science journalism. As such, they are an ideal place to study the intersection between scientific information and fictional worldbuilding. In this seminar, I will discuss what we can learn about the facts couched within the fictional fabric of CliFi novels. Drawing on a corpus of recent publications in the genre, I will discuss how computational methods allow us to better understand the work of these novels and, thereby, how we can harness their power for more effective public communication about this increasingly crucial subject.  

Bio:
Mark Algee-Hewitt is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and English at Stanford University where he directs the Stanford Literary Lab, a multidisciplinary collaborative research group that combines computational with critical approaches to literary inquiry. Mark’s research uses quantitative and statistical methods to explore questions of humanities interest. His forthcoming book, The Afterlife of Aesthetics, combines quantitative and critical methods to shed new light on the social work of aesthetic theory in the long eighteenth-century. At the Stanford Literary Lab, he has led a variety of collaborative projects that use computational methods to explore textual data from the late Medieval period until the present, including a project on the formal causes of suspense in literary texts, a project that explores the evolution of disciplinary writing styles, a project on the use of neologisms for worldbuilding in contemporary Science Fiction texts; and a project on the development of the short story in twentieth-century women’s magazines. His work has appeared in literary studies journals, digital humanities publications, and a variety of interdisciplinary contexts (including Environmental Science journals, Political Science publications, and Psychology journals).

The event is part of the seminar series organized by the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH), Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. It will be held in person and online.

Link for online participation HERE.

For further information: link