This event will be hosted in person only. RSVP to attend.
Since the 2010’s, energy humanities has become a growing field in Slavic Studies and beyond, seeking to explore the intricate connections between energy, culture, and society. However, in this exploration, energy’s thermodynamic counterpart has been neglected – the idea of entropy as an irreversible process resulting in the complete dissipation of energy and the end of all useful work.
In response to this, the workshop suggests starting a conversation on entropy humanities with an interdisciplinary workshop between literary and cultural studies, art history, the history of science, science and technology studies, philosophy and adjacent disciplines. While focusing on Russia and Eurasia, the workshop also invites researchers on other regions.
The aim of the workshop is to reintroduce entropy into today’s environmental, ecocritical and new-materialist conversation: as a principle that is pervading the world, its energy flows, its biological and cultural systems. Just as energy humanities have been familiarizing literary and cultural studies with the forces of nature, entropy humanities should address culture’s sensibility for and negotiation with the fatigue of natural forces.
The workshop is funded by the German Research Association Research Network "Russian Ecospheres." The workshop is co-sponsored by the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Colgate University.
Schedule
Friday (Sept 26):
Introduction: 1:00-1:30
Mieka Erley & Philipp Kohl
Keynote: 1:30-2:30
Barri J. Gold (U-Penn): Beyond Closure: The Affordances of Entropy
Panel 1: 2:45-3:45
Serena Keshavjee (Winnipeg): La Vie renaissant de la mort: Understanding painter Albert Besnard’s Scientific Symbolism
Philipp Kohl (LMU-Munich): Entropy and Ekphrasis: Images of the Dying Sun Around 1900
Panel 2: 4:00-5:00
Jon Stone (Franklin and Marshall): Fin-de-siècle Endings and Beginnings: Decadence and the Dissolution of Matter and Spirit
Jillian Porter (NYU) Dramatic Entropy: Decomposition and Devolution in Chekhov’s Three Sisters
Panel 3: 5:15-6:15
Mieka Erley (Colgate): The Heat Death of Marxism: Narrative and Political Closures
Andy Bruno (Indiana-Bloomington): Growth and Entropy in Soviet Economic Thought
Saturday (Sept 27):
Panel 4: 9:00-10:00
Ksenia Tatarchenko (Johns Hopkins): Under Control: From Decadent Entropy to Communist Signal
Elizabeth Neswald (Brock): Entropy, Posthumanism, and Worlds With and Without Us
Panel 5: 10:15-11:15
Dominic Boyer (Rice, via Zoom): Entropy and the Petrostate
Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech): From Entropology to the Entropocene
Closing Discussion: 11:30-12:00
