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Webinar Programme

BioCriticism – 2025 – Biodiversity and Neglect in Art and Science

  • 28th of March 2025, 2 pm CET: Neglected biodiversity in kitchens and fictions (shared BioCriticism / BioYUFE webinar)

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bioyufe-webinar-neglected-biodiversity-in-kitchens-and-fictions-tickets-1117981836769?aff=oddtdtcreator

Prof. Marko Rohlfs (Chemical Ecology, Bremen University),“Caring mothers: the symbiotic relationship between insects and microbes in nurturing their young – in your kitchen!”

Insects often rely on microbes to care for their young and show a remarkable family life. Fruit flies use gut bacteria and yeast fungi to enrich their offspring’s nutrition, while earwigs employ microbes to protect their eggs from pathogens. This talk uncovers these surprising insect-microbe partnerships, many happening right in our kitchens. So, whenever you chase away or even kill a fly or an earwig, it might be a caring mother.

Teun Joshua Brandt (Literature and Culture, University of Groningen), “Save the Unseen!? Microbial Tricksters in Science Fictions”

Despite growing concerns about microbial biodiversity loss and its cascading consequences of coextinction, the ‘unseen majority’ remains understudied and underrepresented, creating a significant knowledge gap in public awareness. This talk turns to popular science fiction narratives that feature microbial worlds, exploring how they render the uncharismatic affectively resonant. In works such as Joan Slonczewski’s The Children Star, Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, or Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Series, the standardized heroic quest of the truth-seeking scientist is met with microbial ‘trickster figures,’ playfully weirding the rigid ontologies by which we live and make sense of our worlds. This talk argues that trickster storytelling is an effective way to engage wider audiences without romanticizing or anthropomorphizing the microbial, turning the traditional tree of knowledge upside down.

  • 25th of April 2025, 2 pm CET: Can participatory art and science help us see biodiversity ?

Prof. Eliane Beaufils (Theatre Studies, Université de Paris 8), “The Democracy of Organisms: grow and multiply!”

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83110973753?pwd=fbEJsj4tAyLKK9hahWeCoLA7XeaHqK.1

Meeting ID: 831 1097 3753

Passcode: 187669

This contribution aims to shed light on how a participatory theatrical device can be a biopolitical school for biodiversity. The Democracy of Organisms is a political-theatrical device that has been set up on a wasteland in Berlin, and that requires the participation of spectators. Inspired by Latour’s parliament, Club Real extends the democratic experience to other species to manage the wasteland. This presentation will first describe the processes of this theatrical democracy rooted in urban space. It will then explore how art becomes an interspecies behavioral laboratory that not only relies on concepts, representations and thought experiments, but also imagines practical extensions of theories. This kind of experiment could pave the way for the integration of plants and animals into urban management systems, and even into the functioning of Western politics. 

Dr Shannon Lambert (Literature, Ghent University), ““I see a starfish!”: Charting Excitement and Engagement in Online Marine Citizen Science Projects”

This talk looks at online citizen cyberscience projects like Plankton Portal and OceanEYEs (both hosted on the Zooniverse website) to investigate questions of participant motivation and interspecies empathy. In recent years, citizen scientists uploading and categorising of images on apps like eBird and iNaturalist has become a predominant source of biodiversity data across the world—even if these contributions are not always acknowledged in published scientific reports. I begin by exploring existing research on motivations behind individual participation in citizen science projects, before turning to a current gap in existing research: the role that interspecies interactions play in motivating participation. Zooming in on the “Talk” or discourse sections of these two online data categorisation projects, I consider instances of interspecies affect, moments where volunteers express feelings for the strange and often out-of-sight animals they are categorising, such as shrimp, stingrays, and starfish. What affects emerge, I ask, in an encounter between human and photographed creature? And, what insights might these glimmers of feeling offer for research on both participant motivation and multispecies ethics?

  • 16th of May 2025, 2 pm CET: The biodiversity of neglected spaces in poetry and art curation

Dr Jonathan Skinner (English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick), “Ruderal Prosodies: Poetry, Plants, World-Ecology”

Contemporary culture (in fiction, film and television, the visual and performing arts) tells us ever more stories about socio-ecological life at abandoned sites of resource extraction, as the pressures of what environmental historians persuasively argue is one world-ecology expose further sites of conflict around the globe. In this combined story of uneven fortunes in the wake of exhausted resource frontiers, where is the poetry? As a genre, poetry itself tends to inhabit the (semi-)peripheries of institutional and creative economies and so might be particularly responsive to forms of life emerging at abandoned sites of primary resource extraction. This talk focuses on a relatively recent ‘phytopoetic’ turn in contemporary writing—in the work of poets such as Peter Larkin, Stephen Collis, Sumana Roy, JJJJJerome Ellis—to explore poetry’s affinities with the plant life, often ruderal, that moves into the spoils of resource extraction and development, ‘rewilding’ its abandoned landscapes with their inventive strategies for flourishing. (The poetry of John Clare reminds us that this recent turn participates in a long history of ecopoetics, as the expanded field of poetic practice within the horizon of a world-ecology in crisis.) As both a speculative practice and an art of memory, poetry comes to life in these “third landscapes,” spaces gardenist Gilles Clément has termed “the elective territory of diversity, and therefore of evolution, [which] favours invention and is opposed to accumulation” (Manifesto of the Third Landscape). Like the social life at their borders, such ecologies might be catastrophically damaged or they might be harboring “gardens in motion”: what prosodies emerge in these precarious spaces of invention, paused between abandonment and remediation, in exchanges between poets and plants seeking out new rhythms of resistance? 

Dr Martin Grünfeld (Science Communication, University of Copenhagen), “Towards a metabolic welcoming: Fungal relations troubling hospitality at the museum”

Hospitality has become a key concept in contemporary art and curatorial practice. In this talk, we trouble our curatorial experiment The Living Room at Medical Museion through the concept. In The Living Room we attempted to welcome the absolute others of the museum (such as fungi) and establish more-than-human relations. In this context, the concept of hospitality may appear ill-suited as it is anthropocentric from the outset, most often focusing on social relations and politics. Yet precisely its slippery nature in Derrida’s treatment invites us to develop an expanded sense of hospitality. In the talk, our aim is to deconstruct our curatorial experiment to revisit the ambivalences, tensions and uncertainties involved in hosting fungal relations Through slippery binaries such as inside/outside, host/guest, invited/uninvited, inclusion/exclusion, we consider how the microbes over time destabilize our curatorial experiment calling for us to find ways to respond to those others that do not neatly belong within our curatorial categories. We end the chapter proposing the notion of a metabolic welcoming as a deeply transformative, perhaps even dangerous, welcoming of material and biological processes. A welcoming that embraces microbial agencies as always already present even in an apparently dead space such as the museum and calls for us to acknowledge our limitations as hosts and allow ourselves to be overtaken by the other. Only by giving up the role of hosting and respond to these living non-human organisms, can we truly become the hosts that we cannot be.

(Martin’s talk is co-written with Simone Cecilie Pedersen who is a curator and art interpreter at SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark)

Speaker biographies – 2025

Professor Marko Rholfs did a diploma thesis in “Biology” on “Aggregation behaviour in Drosophila” in 2000 at the University of Kiel, Germany. He continued working on this topic during his PhD (2003) and added the “Chemical Ecology” of mould fungi as antagonists of fruit flies until his Habilitation in 2010. Then he moved to the University of Göttingen and continued working on arthropod-fungus interactions, which, besides Drosophila, involved the ecology of soil dwelling Collembola (springtails), and in particular, feeding-induced chemical responses in the fungi. Since 2021 he has been a full professor for chemical ecology at the University of Bremen. He still investigates insect-microbe interactions; his working group’s focus is on how habitat variation promotes or prevents the co-evolution of microbe management and insect social lives. Besides all this, Marko is a biodiversity enthusiast who collaborates with society to promote insects.

Teun Joshua Brandt is a PhD researcher at the University of Groningen, exploring the intersection of biology and literature. His work focuses on how narratives of health, the body, and microbial worlds shape our understanding of biological and literary concepts. As part of an interfaculty project on biological individuality and literary characters, he merges insights from the philosophy of biology and literary theory. Brandt graduated summa cum laude with a master’s thesis on deep-sea microbial worlds in the Anthropocene. Beyond his research, he convenes the Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Groningen.

Dr Shannon Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of literary studies at Ghent University. Her work focuses on intersections between literature and science, with a particular interest in topics like narrative and emotion, and representations of the environment and nonhuman animals in literature. She is the author of Science and Affect in Contemporary Literature: Bodies of Knowledge (Bloomsbury 2024).

Eliane Beaufils is currently Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Paris 8, and a member of the “Scènes du monde” research unit. Her doctoral research focused on violence on contemporary stages in the German-speaking world. Since then, her research has adopted various focuses on contemporary theatricalities and performances, and on spectatorial autopoiesis, as in the books Being-With in Contemporary Performing Arts, edited with Eva Holling and published in Berlin by Neofelis in 2018, and a book whose title in English would be: Touched by Thought. Theatrical Criticality and Poetic Resonance (Toucher par la pensée. Théâtre critique et résonances poétiques, Paris, Hermann, 2021). Since 2018, she has been researching the theatricalities of the Anthropocene, in the projects Theater facing Climate Change (“Le théâtre face au changement climatique”) and Stages for a new world (“Scènes pour un monde nouveau”) led at EUR ArteC with Flore Garcin-Marrou. In this context, she has published twenty articles and two collective works, Dramaturgies des plantes (Tangence, n° 132, published in December 2023 in OA), and the book co-edited with Climène Perrin, L’Écologie en scène. Théâtres politiques et politiques du théâtre, published by Presses Universitaires de Vincennes in September 2024. This year she is delegated to the CNRS national center for scientific research to write a book on these topics.  

Dr Jonathan Skinner is a poet, editor, translator, and critic, known for founding the journal ecopoetics. His poetry collections include The Archive (Gong Farm, 2024), Chip Calls (Little Red Leaves, 2014), Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He has published numerous essays at the intersection of poetry, ecology, activism, landscape and sound studies—most recently on Documentary Environmental Poetics for the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics (2023) and on Joanne Kyger’s Eco-Dharma for Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger (Clemson University Press, 2024). He teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

Dr Martin Grünfeld is an assistant professor in science communication at the University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in continental philosophy from University College Dublin but often finds himself working in the intersections between disciplines and engaging in transdisciplinary collaborations with artists, communicators and curators involving other organisms. For the past five years, he has worked as a curator and researcher at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen focusing on care, decay, metabolism and more-than-human art-science collaborations through material encounters and exhibition making. Currently, he is developing his research in arts-based science communication focusing on issues around climate change and sustainability through sound art and ecopoetics. This research will lead to the co-authored volume Science Communication as Sustainability to appear in 2025 with Bristol University Press. Previously he has published the monograph Writing and Thinking in Contemporary Academia: The Poetics of Clarity with Routledge and research articles in e.g.  Journal of Medical Humanities, Centaurus and Parrhesia.

Simone Cecilie Pedersen is a curator and art interpreter at SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Copenhagen and has been working specifically on the notion of hospitality in relation to art-science collaborations in and visitor experiences with contemporary art in her thesis. Simone is also a member of the editorial board for the Danish art journal Periskop and has previously occupied positions at Arken museum of contemporary art and the Medical Museion.

 

BioCriticism – 2024 – “Through the microscope”

  • 2d of February 2024, 2 pm CET: “Microbiology in the Twentieth-Century Novel”

Speaker:  Dr. Patrick Armstrong (Cambridge University)

Respondent: Dr. Sarah Bouttier (Ecole Polytechnique)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81781878092?pwd=WVpROG9qUlJXemQ0d1dyNWpkWG8zdz09

Meeting ID: 817 8187 8092
Passcode: 244068

Abstract: This presentation will focus on the assimilation of microbiological language into the twentieth-century novel. In particular, I will explore the prominent inclusion of microscopic seeing and the dislocating language of microbiology in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915). Through Ursula Brangwen’s encounter with a unicellular organism, Lawrence generates his own microbiological sublime, finding new and more unusual ways of articulating intense experiences in prose fiction. This paper will also consider parallel attempts to incorporate microbiological materials into the novel. Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith (1925), for example, offers a striking example of the integration of bacteriology into the modern American novel. Paul de Kruif, an American microbiologist who published Microbe Hunters a year later in 1926, assisted Lewis with the composition of the novel, providing up-to-date scientific knowledge to help create accurate depictions of a laboratory. This paper argues that the incorporation of microbiological language into the novel creates suggestive and dislocating clashes of scale that challenge the cognitive processes required from the reader. Reformulating Roland Barthes’ effect of reality, we can start to identify the hyper-reality effect produced by technical or scientific descriptions of microbiological phenomena in prose fiction.

  • 8th of March 2024, 2 pm CET:  “Tiny New World : French Visual Culture and the Microbial Imaginary since the Early Twentieth Century”

Speaker: Dr. Fleur Hopkins-Loféron (CNRS and THALIM laboratory, Sorbonne Nouvelle University)

Respondent: Prof. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84056711478?pwd=ekZyODVXYkdETXZRb3gyRU1kc3V3dz09

Meeting ID: 840 5671 1478
Passcode: 529273

Abstract: From the beginning of the 20th century, the French media imagination was struck by what was called the “microbial fury”, in the wake of Louis Pasteur. Microbes were everywhere, in the form of “love microbes” or “jealousy microbes” in vaudeville plays, as the main character in novels of scientific imagination or as a decorative element in Art Nouveau wallpapers. By presenting the rich multiform imaginary of the microbe in the twentieth century, in the visual and intellectual culture of the time (invader, tiny beauty, miniature world, chimera, monster, etc.), this talk intends to question the metamorphosis that this mysterious being has undergone over time (ally, individual, source of life, etc.). Particular emphasis will be placed on the visual cultures of the sublime, miniaturisation and the infinitely small.

  • 26th of April 2024, 2 pm CET: “The Biomolecularisation of the Archive”

Speaker: Prof. Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester)

Respondent: Prof. François-Joseph Lapointe (Université de Montréal)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83685396506?pwd=ejZlcThMZGVKNXkyRHZXSkt1T0dCQT09

Meeting ID: 836 8539 6506
Passcode: 602541

Abstract: New genetic approaches to the material of the archive have wide implications for our conception of the past, our understanding of memory, and our broader sense of what historical information even is. Whilst historical data has regularly been developed and challenged, and historians use a breadth of information, my contention is that the accelerated development of huge datasets that are beyond the reach of ‘historians’ has the potential to transform the discipline. Set within (whilst also driving) a wider biomolecular turn in society, as cultural understanding of the past becomes genetically-informed, this change in the historical approach suggests a shift towards what I call ‘double helix history’. 

  • 24th of May 2024, 2 pm CET: “Books of Life in the Age of the Genome”

Speaker: Dr. Paul Hamann-Rose (University of Passau)

Respondent: Dr. Rūta Šlapkauskaitė (Vilnius University)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82747277584?pwd=TjUwdUhYb2ZDbloxQmFPYUgwRFEydz09

Meeting ID: 827 4727 7584
Passcode: 329900

Abstract: Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the novel increasingly enters into dialogue with genetic discourses of life, examining their foundational assumptions as well as potential consequences for individuals and socio-political communities. The novel does not simply embrace the new genetic propositions but appropriates and critically examines them. Central concerns that have shaped the novel’s traditional representation of life expand to include a newly genetic perspective. In the age of the genome, I argue, the novel emerges as a genetic ‘book of life’. To demonstrate the theoretical, aesthetic and political consequences of this development, I turn to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. The trilogy’s ambitious imaginative treatment of genetic discourses and technologies exemplifies an important ecological exploration of genetic science today, which underlines the critical potential of the novel to contribute to cultural and socio-political debates about future life on the planet.

 

BioCriticism – 2023 – “Through the microscope”

  • February 24th, 2 pm Central European Time, in person and online

Communication scholar Professor Lisa B. Keränen (Colorado University) will discuss “Biocriticism as inventional practice: The case of global health security”. Her respondent will be Literature scholar Professor Catherine Bernard (Université Paris Cité)

  • March 10th, 2 pm CET, online

Theatre director Frédérique Aït-Touati (CNRS) will discuss La Trilogie Terrestre (created with Bruno Latour). Her respondent will be Dr Anna Street (Le Mans University).

 
  • April 21st, 2 pm CET, online

Professor François-Joseph Lapointe (Université de Montréal) will discuss microbiology in his artistic practice

His respondent will be Dr Eric Bapteste (CNRS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie).

  • May 12th, 2 pm CET, cancelled

 

  • June 9th, 2 pm CET, online

Literature scholar Dr Lara Choksey (University College London) will discuss “Epigenetics’ vague poetics”. Her respondent will be Professor Susan Squier (Pennsylvania State University).

Please contact Liliane Campos for information and links: liliane.campos@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

BioCriticism is organised with the support of PRISMES EA4398 and the Institut Universitaire de France