Hopkins and His Environments: A Virtual International Conference, June 24-26, 2021

From the Cliffs of Moher to the Valley of the Elwy, from leafy countrysides to city centres “smeared” with everyday life, Gerard Manley Hopkins was acutely attuned to environmental conditions. The 2021 international Hopkins conference, to be held virtually 24 to 26 June 2021, will consider the many environments in which he worked: natural, textual, aesthetic, political, theological, Jesuitical, and social.

Topics for 20-minute presentations might include: Hopkins and Victorian science; Victorian eco-systems and environmentalism; the literary and aesthetic environments of his poetry and prose (including Pre-Raphaelite, Aestheticist, or Decadent art); the intersections of his works and those of his contemporaries; and the political and cultural “surroundings” of Hopkins’s life in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

As a popular term, “environment” came into its own in the nineteenth century, featured in works by the likes of Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick. “Hopkins and His Environments” will be a three-day exploration of its literary, scientific, social, political, and cultural implications in relation to a remarkable poet.

Keynote speaker: Julia Saville, Professor Emerita, University of Illinois

Prof. Saville, the author of A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2000) and Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic (2017), is currently completing a study of the environmental ethics and ecopoetics underpinning the work of late nineteenth-century poets such as Hopkins and Thomas Hardy.

This will be a free conference; there are no fees for the event.

The deadline for submissions is 25 January 2021.

Please send your 300-word proposal to:

Lesley Higgins
19higgins55@gmail.com

Organising Committee: Paul Kelly (Chair), Noel Barber S.J., Frank Fennell, Lesley Higgins, Jude  Nixon,