RCEH public lectures and research seminars

Our public lectures feature a range of speakers from Bath Spa University and other organisations. They are free to attend and include light refreshments to follow. Please visit the links for full information and to book your place.

2023-24 public lectures

Past public lectures

2023
2022
2021

Affiliated events

2020
  • 15 January - Evelyn Araluen Corr and Jonathan Dunk: Indigenous literature, poetics and decolonisation
  • 12 February - Giovanna Gioli: The Semiotics of Rubble
  • 7 May - Robert Winstanley-Chesters and Nicholas Leof Ahlmark: North Korean Ghost Ships
  • 13 May - Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak: Arboreal Entanglements: Botanic Imagination in Ecopoetry by Children
  • 14 October - Claire Ratinon: The Pleasures and Politics of Growing Food
  • 28 October - Conor Murphy: Reconstructing and re-evaluating historical droughts and impacts in the British and Irish Isles
  • 18 November - Dr Dylan McGarry: Empatheatre: A theatre-based methodology for collaborative, woven, transgressive and 'de-academised' research in South Africa
  • 16 December - Professor Sian Sullivan: The Music Returns to Kai-as - a film by the Future Pasts project
2019
  • 16 January - Margarita Díaz-Andreu: Sounds and the sacred in rock art soundscapes.
  • 13 March - John Wylie: The Common Line: Landscape Politics, Creative Practice and Digital Geographies
  • 27 March - Melissa Harrison reading and discussing her new novel, All Among the Barley
  • 10 April - Clara Mancini: Animal-Computer Interaction: Animals as Co-Designers of Multispecies Technologically Supported Ecosystems.
  • 8 May - Professor Owain Jones: Toxic dwellings? The ecocides of globalised consumer society
  • 17 June - Linda Tucker and Jason Turner: How western science and sacred science converge to save a species
  • 16 October - Samantha Walton: Is Nature Healing? Exploring the History and Future of the 'Nature Cure'
  • 29 October - Prerna Singh Bindra: The Fight for India's Wildlife
  • 30 October - Glenna Batson: Human Origami: The Folding Continuum of Human-Environmental Life (workshop and talk)
  • 13 November - Rosalind Crisp: DIRt (Dance In Regional disaster zones)
  • 11 December - Michelle Bastian: Whale falls, suspended ground, and extinctions never known.
2018
2017
2016
  • 5 October - Professor Kate Rigby: Professorial Lecture - Infernal Ecologies: Literature, ethics, and fire 'down under'

Special events

Marine Transgressions Conference 2018

Marine Transgressions was a two-day Environmental Humanities conference that took place on the 7 and 8 June 2018, at the Create Centre, Bristol.

It was a collaboration between the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities of the University of Bristol and Bath Spa University.

ACU Commonwealth Summer School 2017

The Association of Commonwealth Universities Summer School provides an opportunity for talented university students from around the Commonwealth to come together for an exciting week of expert lectures, group work, field trips, skills development and social events.

The 2017 Summer School was held at Bath Spa University from 5 - 13 August. It explored interrelationships between humans and other living beings, and between cultural practices and environmental problems – and looked at how these can be examined through different academic disciplines and creative arts. Bath Spa University is a world leader in research and teaching in these areas.

Postgraduate Forum 2017

The first Environmental Humanities Postgraduate Forum, Environmental Humanities: Perspectives in Practice, took place on 14 July 2017. It was a student-led event, providing an opportunity for presentations on work-in-progress, to which staff were warmly invited.

Speakers included:

  • Patricia Brien: Stroudwater Scarlet cloth - Exploring the dynamic human & non-human relations in site-specific fabric – boundless Kin(g)doms that matter
  • Aiyana Rosen: Human-Animal Relations in the German Dairy Industry - A genealogical analysis
  • Ben Crushcov: a talk on writing the script for a feature film about a group of Greenpeace protestors who were arrested in the Arctic in 2013.
  • Lydia Halcrow: Mapping place through the visual arts: a contemporary approach to landscape.
  • Charlotte Shipperley: “Flooding the Bathtub: The Politics of Invisibility and Community Resilience in Behn Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)”.
  • Ruth Olden, PhD: Lost world of the nearby: Minimal ethics on Govan Graving Docks
  • Laura Denning: Primordial; Hydrofeminism and Deep Listening
Being Human Festival of the Humanities 2016

As part of the British Academy’s Festival of the Humanities in 2016, Bath Spa presented three public engagement events concerning peoples’ hopes and fears in relation to environmental change.

Changing Landscapes, Rising Waters: Kate Rigby, Owain Jones and Sam Walton presented a series of short talks and film screenings arising from their current research projects, all of which concerned peoples relationships with the watery worlds of ocean, estuaries and rivers during a time of rapid climatic and environmental change.

Environmental Literature Reading and Discussion: Three of Bath Spa’s creative writers, Stephen Moss, Maggie Gee, and Samantha Walton, read from their work and discussed how it explores the hopes and fears that are inextricably entangled with the living landscapes we inhabit at a time of rapid environmental change and biodiversity loss.

“Gobaith ac ofn; Dwy sgriniad / Hope and fear: two screenings”: A screening of two short films - Timeline and Y Gors - that explored extreme weather in West Wales, challenging the idea that climate change only happens in far-flung places or in the future. 

Inaugural Symposium 2016

The Inaugural Symposium for the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities was held 15-16 December 2016 at Bath Spa University.

Based around the title, The Environmental Humanities: Doing Interdisciplinarity with Depth, the symposium sought to explore the challenges involved in doing interdisciplinarity well and 'at depth' across the Environmental Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and to consider the impediments and opportunities that might line our potential pathways to impact.

Schedule

Follow the links to view videos of the presentations.

15 December 2016

5.15 – 7.00pm: Opening plenary: Bridging the Great Divide

  • Richard Kerridge (Chair)
  • Mike Hulme (King’s College, London)
  • Poul Holm (Trinity University, Dublin)
  • Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University and Goldsmiths College, London)
  • With Maggie Gee (Bath Spa University)

7.00 – 8.00pm: Official launch by Vice-Provost John Strachan

16 December 2016

9.00 – 10.30am: Onto-epistemologies and ethics – Chair, Paul Reid-Bowen

10.50am – 12.20pm: Spatio-temporalities – Chair, Rebecca Schaaf

1.20 – 2.50pm: Inter-species connectivities – Chair, Stephen Moss

2.50 – 4.20pm: NaturalCultural calamities – Chair, James Jeffers

4.40 – 6.20pm: Eco-poetries and ecopoetics – Chair, Terry Gifford

6.20 – 7.00pm: Concluding discussion