CFP

 

*This page lists CFPs for Defoe sessions at other conferences. For information on the Defoe Society’s Biennial Meeting, please visit the Conference page.

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Defoe Society has proposed the following special session for the 56th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which will be held April 9-11, 2026, in Philadelphia. Please consider submitting an abstract for this session during Round 3, August 4-September 22.

Weather, Climate, and the Anthropocene in Daniel Defoe [ASECS Panel ID 60]

Co-Chairs: Rivka Swenson, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Leah Orr, University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Papers welcome on topics including but not limited to Defoe’s writing on weather, climate, and the proto-Anthropocene as a journalist, moralist, novelist, and proto-scientific observer, e.g.:

  • His empirical approach to data collection and firsthand reporting on extreme weather and meteorological disaster;
  • His depiction of weather as divine design, judgment, or Providence;
  • His use of weather as plot device or immersive realism in the fiction;
  • His development of weather-related and climate-related metaphor;
  • His interest in connections between regional climate and aspects of human behavior and sociology (e.g., environment/geography, seasonal variability, daily life, agriculture, and commerce);
  • His observations on environmental health and climate-related illness (physical, mental);
  • His awareness of climate-related challenges to colonial exploitation;
  • His prefiguring of Anthropocene themes (human dominion over nature and nonhumans; the ecological consequences of colonization, trade, empire, and urbanization; moral interpretations of environmental change; commentary on the effects of agriculture, fishing, mining, fossil fuel use, pollution, land-clearing, farming, terraforming, and urban design);
  • His relevance for considering modern theories of the Anthropocene; intersections with scholars of Earth Science and Environmental Science (Johan Rockstrom, Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen), Philosophy and Critical Theory (Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Timothy Morton, Jason Moore), Environmental Humanities (Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruno Latour).

Keywords: Britain/England; Ecology/Eco-humanities/Environmental Studies; Global/World/Any Country; Literature