Susan McHugh featured in Sweden
The research and creative work of Susan McHugh, Ph.D., chair of the Department of English, has been featured at several recent venues in Sweden.
At the end of November, McHugh was the only U.S. scholar -- among researchers from Sweden, the UK, New Zealand and Germany -- featured at the "Animal Places Workshop" at Uppsala University, which is the oldest Scandinavian university and home to the innovators of the Linneaan and Celsius systems.
Co-sponsored by the programs in gender studies, sociology, and urban studies, McHugh鈥檚 talk elaborated how contemporary novels concern the renewal of practices of shore whaling and other traditional practices of hunting marine mammals among indigenous communities of North America鈥檚 Pacific Northwest and the Marshall Islands in order to redress historical exploitations of people along with natural resources.
In the first week of December at Kungliga Tekniska h枚gskolan (KTH) Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, McHugh also spoke at an interdisciplinary conference titled "Im/mortalities and In/finitudes in the Anthropocene: Perspectives from the Environmental Humanities."
Her presentation focused on the ways in which contemporary fictions incorporate ghosts, gods, and other "usefully dead" creatures alongside animal characters in fiction to address environmental and political issues that concern the slow violence of industrial as well as military toxicity. The event was sponsored in part by the Division of History and the Environment at KTH.
Also in Sweden, this week at the Pufenforf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University, which is Scandinavia鈥檚 second-oldest university, McHugh鈥檚 work was celebrated at the book launch for Exploring the Animal Turn, a collection of the best work from the interdisciplinary, year-long workshop of the same name that brought together scholars from several nations including Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., New Zealand, Italy, Canada, and the U.S.
McHugh鈥檚 contribution "Allowed" was the only contribution to the book that was chosen by the editors to be read aloud at this celebration. A creative nonfictional essay focused on McHugh鈥檚 experiences with dog walking on Hills Beach, the piece is accompanied in the book by several photographs by her partner Mik Morrisey.