A one-day conference on elemental aesthetics and politics in Classics and the Humanities as a whole.

The study of elements (air, water, land) is at the center of intersecting discourses (posthuman, anticolonial) in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Climate change and the COVID pandemic have made it particularly urgent to address the ways in which the materiality of  air, water, and land, in their entanglement, affect our analyses of biopolitics and necropolitics, while helping us imagine the possibilities of elemental transcorporeality in a moment of interlocking crises. This workshop will contribute to this conversation by bringing together a group of scholars working in different fields of both humanities and social sciences. Speakers will include Shane Butler, Louise Hornby, Jim Porter, Alex Purves, Debarati Sanyal, Mario Telò, Victoria Wohl, Dora Zhang