Early Modern Conversations in Ecology

Week 7, 25 November 5.15-7.15 p.m. 

Schwarzman Lecture Theatre L1, reception in 10.302  

Professor Bart Van Es (English) ‘True Fire: Saint Augustine, the Climate Crisis, and Creative Non-Fiction’

Professor Francesca Southerden (Italian) ‘Affective Ecologies in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems’ 

Bart van Es will be talking about his creative non-fiction biography True Fire: Saint Augustine in an Age of Crisis, forthcoming with Faber & Faber and other publishers in January 2027.  True Fire is about crisis, both in the late 4th and early 5th centuries and in our present moment.  Blending travel narrative and memoir with Augustine’s theology, the book addresses urgent questions about a man-made climate catastrophe, the nature of evil, and the human will.

Francesca Southerden’s talk will explore ecological ways of thinking affect in Petrarch’s lyric poems, constellating some examples of the desiring subject’s entanglement with the vegetal world in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. She will reflect both on how affects circulate in the encounter between human and non-human forces and on the possibilities that open up in embracing ecology as a critical practice. 

All are welcome.