Event Archive
This is an archive of past events within the Department of English Studies. Please see our current events for forthcoming activities.
Some of our public events are recorded and are available as podcasts via our Research English At Durham blog.

‘Dripping & spitting, we rise’: Water Crisis, Hydropolitics and World Literature
A free online public talk, by Dr Sharae Deckard (University College Dublin), and introduced by Dr Dan Grausam. The talk is part of the “Capitalism, Nature and Climate Crisis” series, organised by the Centre for Culture and Ecology.
About this talk
The talk will examine water crisis in the era of climate emergency, exploring the cultural patterning and representations corresponding to the socio-ecological relations organizing the extraction, production, and consumption of water both as commodity and as energy in the neoliberal regime of the capitalist world-ecology. I will investigate how specific infrastructures of water management and hydropower are mediated in world-literary hydropoetry and hydrofiction and the ways in which they are depicted as producing path-dependence and asymmetric distribution. However, I will also explore how texts reconceive water in terms of interdependence and hydrosocial interrelation, thus countering the capitalist discourses through which flowing water is transformed into exchangeable, quantifiable commodities or forms of energy. In these, the contradictions facing the appropriation strategies of ‘cheap water’ and ‘extreme water’ are imagined not just in terms of exhaustion of particular technics of water management, but as opportunities for resistance and transformation.
About Dr Sharae Deckard
Sharae Deckard is the author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization (2010), and co-author with the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) of Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015). She is co-editor of Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry (2018); a special issue of Ariel on “Towards a Radical World Literature: Experimental Writing in a Globalizing World” (2016) ; a special issue of The Journal of World-Systems Research on “Ireland in the World-System” (2016; a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing on “Postcolonial Studies and World Literature.”
To join
The talk takes place via Zoom. Please email k.d.oloff@durham.ac.uk to be sent a link.
Contact k.d.oloff@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.
READ Blog
Research in English At Durham (READ) blog showcasing the the literary research emerging from the Department of English Studies
Events
We host a large number of conferences, lectures and seminars each year, many of them open to the public. Find out more on our Events page.
Podcasts
Many of our public lectures, seminars and conferences are recorded, and can be listened to as podcasts.
Next Event
- 20th January 2021
- Sensory Experiments in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Online (Zoom)
- Dr Erica Fretwell (University of Albany) and Dr Shannon Draucker (Siena College)