Keynote Lecture: Border Crossings in the More-Than-Human World (17.07.2024, Amerikahaus München)

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Date: July 17, 2024 (7 p.m.)
Location: Amerikahaus München (Karolinenplatz 3, 80333 Munich)

In this talk, Jessica J. Lee considers the role of contemporary nature writing in tackling the complexity of bearing witness to and understanding the Anthropocene. How can hybrid literary forms—fusing prose, poetry, image, and more—help us make sense of a world of hybrid beings? And how does telling our own migration stories help us to form kinship on the page with species often derided for very similar movements? Drawing on topics explored in her own work in Dispersals, and on the works of writers including Nina Mingya Powles, Kerri ni Docharteigh, and Kyo Maclear, Lee asks how we might tell stories in which belonging, identity, and ecological precarity are entwined, extending beyond the human frame towards plants and other beings. 

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of three books of nature writing, TurningTwo Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge.

This Keynote Lecture is part of the BAA Seminar “Questions of Ecology,” which brings together students from the Universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Munich, and Augsburg. The BAA Seminar is organized by Isabel Kalous (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Nicole Schneider (LMU Munich) und Ina Batzke (University of Augsburg).​

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