We are pleased to announce the conference program for “The Coronavirus Pandemic: An Environmental Humanities Perspective,” to be held via Zoom on February 16-17, 2023.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been recognized as a direct response to the complex interplay of progressive environmental degradation through, for example, ecosystem disruption, urbanization, international travel, and climate change. Accordingly, John Robert McNeill positions COVID-19 as “an environmental history event as well as a public health crisis.”¹ This conference brings together scholars from across the globe, and across multiple fields, who apprehend the coronavirus across a human/environmental nexus. Presentations at this conference consider the COVID-19 pandemic a key challenge for the present, addressing implications for the future in the areas of ecology, community organizing, planetary health, resilience, waste, and human/more-than-human relations, among others.

The conference program is available below, with each panel comprised of three to four 15-20-minute presentations, and allocated time for questions. Details of each panel, alongside further information pertaining to keynote presentations from Eben Kirksey (Oxford University) and Cymene Howe (Rice University), can be found within.

Conference attendance is free and open to all interested parties. Please email air.anglistik@univie.ac.at to register.

¹ John Robert McNeill, “Bats, Battiness, and the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Environmental History 25 (2020): 635-639.