Activities

Conference Presentations

• “Revelation and the Reverberations of Challenger: Aerial Catastrophe and Atmospheric Disaster”
  Chantelle Mitchell (Speaker)
  June 2, 2022 – June 4, 2022
  The 23rd Annual International Conference of the English Department, Literature and Cultural Studies Section: Disaster Discourse: Representations of Catastrophe, University of Bucharest, Romania
  
  
• “Questions of Visibility: Aerial Relations across Society and the Environment, as Revealed by COVID-19”
  Savannah Schaufler (Speaker)
  October 20, 2022 – October 22, 2022
  Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) Annual Conference, USA
  
  
• “‘Eco-thrax’: A Speculative Reading of Anthrax as Gaia’s Bioweapon”
  Chantelle Mitchell (Speaker)
  November 16, 2022 – November 18, 2022
  From the Black Death to COVID-19: Airborne Diseases in History, Literature, and Culture,
  University of Vienna, Austria
  
  
• “Vaccine/Vaccination Hesitancy: Challenging Science and Society”
  Savannah Schaufler (Speaker)
  November 16, 2022 – November 18, 2022
  From the Black Death to COVID-19: Airborne Diseases in History, Literature, and Culture,
  University of Vienna, Austria
  
  
• “Weathering the Smoke: British Industrial Fiction as Climate Change Fiction”
  Tatiana Konrad (Speaker)
  December 9, 2022
  DACH Victorianists: Ecocritical Perspectives
  Online Workshop, Germany
  
  
• “Rethinking Pestilence: Viral Destabilizations of the Secular, Environmental Apocalypse”
  Chantelle Mitchell (Speaker) 
  February 16, 2023 – February 17, 2023
  The Coronavirus Pandemic: An Environmental Humanities Perspective,
  University of Vienna, Austria
  
  
• “‘Plast(dem)ic’: Sustainability Reset, Excessive Plastic Waste, and COVID-19”
  Savannah Schaufler (Speaker) 
  February 16, 2023 – February 17, 2023
  The Coronavirus Pandemic: An Environmental Humanities Perspective,
  University of Vienna, Austria 

Project-Related Teaching

• BA Seminar “Airborne Pandemics: (Visual) Culture and Ecology of Disease”
  Tatiana Konrad (Lecturer)
  October 10, 2022 – January 30, 2023 (WS 2022/23)
  University of Vienna, Austria
  The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has emphasized the tight connection between humans and nonhumans. This course explores this relationship by drawing on numerous fictional and real pandemics depicted in cultural texts. Through its exclusive focus on airborne pandemics, the course investigates the relationship between air, breath, and the environment and foregrounds the issue of (in)visibility when it comes to the virus, toxicity, and pollution. In doing so, it explores pandemics from the perspectives of both the health humanities and the environmental humanities.