Doctoral Workshop in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies in English 10/12

29 Octobre 2025

Patrick Jones

Dr. Patrick Jones, UNIGE

Prof. Simon Swift, UNIGE

The Modern and Contemporary fortnightly workshop (Mod Con) is a well-attended workshop for PhD students and staff from all CUSO universities. The workshop is popular among doctoral students and early career scholars from the CUSO network. The workshop is a valuable space for the exchange of ideas between doctoral students working on modern and contemporary literatures of the English-speaking world. The 2025 programme will include talks, workshops and professionalisation seminars and it will remain an important space for work-in-progress papers from doctoral students.

29^th October. 'Indigenous Cosmological Ecologies and Decolonial Wonder'.

Dr Ho'esta Mo'e'hahne (UCLA): english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/moehahne-hoesta/.

Environmental violence and genocide remain persistent concerns in the Indigenous expressive cultures of North America. At the same time, speculative storytelling and queer aesthetics have become burgeoning spaces in contemporary Indigenous literatures. Drawing on Indigenous theories of speculation as well as Indigenous environmental thought, Dr. Mo'e'hahne's talk will trace the ways that contemporary Indigenous fiction and visual art imagine radical possibilities for human and more-than-human peoples who endure ecological violence in Canada and beyond. Reading Chelsea Vowel's (Métis, Lac Ste. Anne) short story, "Maggie Sue," alongside Vowel's activism and public intellectual work, Dr. Mo'e'hahne will analyse Vowel's remappings of Indigenous urbanised homelands through queer sensations, rich cosmological knowledges, and deep understandings of history and ecology. Published in Vowel's pathbreaking fiction collection, Buffalo is the New Buffalo (2022), the short story follows an Indigiqueer human protagonist who enters the spirit world outside of a grocery store in suburban Edmonton, Alberta. Smitten with the female Cree shape-shifting fox that she encounters, the protagonist follows the being through the streets before being transported to an alternative space-time above the city, where animal peoples have reclaimed the prairies from settler colonialism. Dr. Mo'e'hahne proposes that Vowel's wonderous ecologies transcend the apocalyptic, colonial present while also gesturing to more ethical relations between humans and non-humans. The workshop will consist of a lecture followed by discussion of different methods for analysing diverse cultural texts, including contemporary fiction, speculative narratives, eco-literatures, visual art, queer and trans literatures, and urban geography. Participants are invited to read Vowel's short story before the workshop and participants will take part in collaborative discussions of the piece in light of current conversations that are taking place in the environmental humanities, studies of genre, decolonial theory, gender studies, Indigenous studies, American studies, global Anglophone literary studies, visual culture, and media studies.

UNIGE

4.15 pm Room Phil 204, Uni Philosophes, Bd des Philosophes 22, 1205 Genève

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