2025-2026 Series: "Environment, Humanity and (Post)humanism."

CFP for Ring Lecture Proposals for 2025/2026:

The topic for AY 25-26 is Environment, Humanity, and (Post)humanism. This series provides an opportunity to explore the theme across our various fields and regions. We welcome presentations from a range of disciplines and media. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Ecocriticism, Ecocinema, and Ecomedia (e.g. Ecological and Environmental Simulation Games.)
• The role of the environment in development, energy cultures, disaster/environmental refugees, and resilience/conservation initiatives.
• Planetary and geographically/culturally based repercussions, interpretations, and responses to environmental disasters.
• Current debates on post-humanism in Philosophy, Cultural or Anthropological Studies (from Heidegger to Luhmann to Donna Haraway, Ann Tsing et al.)
• Historical and contemporary approaches to the questions of the human and humanism from diverse perspectives within the humanities and social sciences.
• Discourses that promote or question the value of humanism.
• Green Architecture, Ecosocialism, and Sci-Fi storytelling as means for addressing the Posthuman.

We encourage collaborative and interdisciplinary GSL work, presented in stimulating experimental formats. Please use the Invitation to the Ring Lecture form to submit your 200-300 word abstract (Topic, Presenters, Department, Title, Format and Project Description) by Oct 3, 2025.

Fall 2025 Ring Lecture: Retrieving Humanism in Broken Times

November 7, 2025 - 1:00pm-2:30pm
Museum Lounge, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Speaker: Roy Chan, Associate Professor, Chinese Literature

Roy Chan received his Ph.D. (2009) in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and also holds a B.A. (2002) in Russian and Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. His parents were working-class immigrants from China and Hong Kong who cooked in restaurants and cleaned hospitals. As a first-generation student from a non-educated background, Prof. Chan is deeply concerned about access and equity to educational institutions for all students, as well as support for other underrepresented faculty.

Abstract:

Most of us here agree that the humanities are worth saving, but not all of us agree that humanism as a philosophy should be. Myriad forms of inequity, including sexism, racism, colonialism, and environmental degradation have been laid at the door of a humanism faulted for its anthropocentrism (and not without reason). I hope to show that there is a humanism worth retrieving, but only if it is rooted in a dialectical and speculative vision of the human as an ever-evolving category rather than as an abstract and transcendental standard hovering over and above the world. I draw on renewed interest in the legacies of Marxist humanism (including figures as Gillian Rose, Evald Ilyenkov, Wang Ruoshui, György Lukács) for thinking through the relationships between labor, species-being, and universality.

Winter 2026 Ring Lecture

Faculty Roundtable on the new Global Environments major in SSGSL
Participants: Rachel DiNitto, Fabienne Moore, Lanie Millar, Miriam Chorley-Schulz, Dorothee Ostmeier

Spring 2026 Ring Lecture

Speaker: Xan Holt, Assistant Professor, German Scandinavian.
Title: Decomposing the Wor(l)d: Ecolinguistic Disturbance and Repair in Esther Kinsky’s Störungen