Description:

As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific.

Join us for a Buffett Book Talk with Sarah Dimick, author of Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia University Press, 2024), which links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities, contending that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue and exploring how attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities.

A reception will follow the program.

About the Author
Sarah Dimick is jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on portrayals of climate change and environmental justice in contemporary global Anglophone literatures.

Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated at this time.