The ongoing destruction of the natural world raises critical questions about responsibility. How do we remember the victims, both human and non-human? And how do we negotiate the difficult question of who is to blame, especially in situations where we are all in one way or another implicated? Contemporary culture plays a crucial role in addressing these questions.
The aim of this project is to understand how environmental degradation is being framed and remembered as violence in contemporary culture, and how representations of such ecological violence articulate and reflect on questions of guilt, implication, and responsibility. Ecological violence has deep historical roots that tie it to other forms of violence, especially colonialism and genocide. Writers, artists, and filmmakers are finding ways of representing these ‘ecologies of violence,’ making visible the historical, structural and discursive links between crimes against humanity and crimes against nature.
This will be the first large-scale cross-media study of the cultural imagination of ecocide and other forms of eco-violence. Drawing on recent approaches in memory studies and ecocriticism, we will elaborate an innovative ecological approach that can account for the connections between different forms of violence and their cultural representation and memory.
This project will effect a reorientation in cultural memory studies and ecocriticism toward a conceptualization of cultural memory in more-than-human terms. Paying attention to how the histories of suffering of humans and non-humans are entangled fundamentally changes the way we think about responsibility.
News
-
Writer Dekker and researcher Driscoll encourage more-than-human engagements through language at sold out event.
On 11 April, writer Nikki Dekker and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University Kári Driscoll, led participants in a discussion on zoopoetics. Focusing on birding as a writing method, participants were encouraged to represent and foster more-than-human engagements through language. The room was packed full. Among the participants were students, biologist and creative…
-
Ecoviolence looks back at a successful workshop event
On 10 April artists, curators and museum educators came together to address the representation of colonial and ecological violence in museums. The workshop titled ‘Representing violent pasts: museums, colonialism and environmental degradation’ was held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Read the summary report, written by Flora Lehmann, to discover the key achievements and outcomes gained and…
-
Call for Papers: Conflict Rivers. 30 – 31 October 2025
Conflict Rivers is a workshop hosted by the Ecologies of Violence: Crimes Against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination Research Project and the Water Cultures Community of the Network for Environmental Humanities at Utrecht University and convened by Ifor Duncan. Rivers are constitutive features of the cultural imagination, the focus of innumerable artworks, literary…
-
Clara de Massol de Rebetz: Remembering the Anthropocene
On March 13th, Clara de Massol de Rebetz joined us for a reading group on eco-memory to talk about her book Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the Human (2023). Clara is a lecturer and researcher in memory studies and environmental humanities based at King’s College London. Her research, grounded in cultural and literary studies, explores…
-
Zsuzsanna Ihar
On February 13th we were joined by Zsuzsanna Ihar for our bi-weekly project reading group. Zsuzsanna is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge where she co-convenes the research group Military Surplus: Toxicity, Industry, and War, and she is also currently Landhaus fellow at the Rachel Carson Center. We were thrilled to read a…
-
Visiting researcher Ido Fuchs
We are delighted to welcome visiting researcher Ido Fuchs. Ido is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He is also an Associated EUME Doctoral Fellow at the Berlin Forum Transregionale Studien. Until June he will be staying as a visiting researcher at Utrecht University Network for Environmental Humanities….
-
Nature’s Narratives
This Spring, Tom van Bunnik is co-organizing a series of workshops under the theme of “Nature’s Narratives”, in collaboration with the Network for Environmental Humanities and the International Literature Festival Utrecht (ILFU). In these workshops, participants are asked to consider how ‘nature’ produces its own narratives, and how imaginative and artistic expression can respond and…
Agenda
-
Workshop Representing violent pasts: museums, colonialism and environmental degradation
On 10 April, the Memory & Heritage Network of Utrecht University and the ERC project Ecologies of Violence: Crimes Against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination (Eco-Violence) are organizing a workshop on the representation of colonial and ecological violence in museums. This workshop is aimed at scholars and cultural practitioners (such as curators and museum…
-
Book talk ‘Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the human’, by author Clara de Massol
This talk revolves around my recent book Remembering the Anthropocene: Memorials Beyond the Human. The book defines and apprehends the developing field of environmental memory studies and reflects on the possibilities, challenges, prospects and limitations of culturally remembering (in) the Anthropocene. Located at the intersection of environmental humanities and memory studies, the analysis draws on…
-
Workshop ‘Ecopoetics in the Anthropocene’, with Juliana Spahr and Tom van Bunnik.
What is the role of eco-poetry in the Anthropocene? How do eco-poets adopt and reinvent poetic conventions to face the climate crisis? These are some of the questions that Juliana Spahr and Tom van Bunnik will address during the workshop organized by the Network for Enironmental Humanities and the International Literature Festival Utrecht (IFLU). Through…
