The Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and the Environment (CHE) invites you to the 2026 Graduate Student Symposium. Hosted by CHE’s Graduate Associate Organizing Committee, this year’s theme, Agency in the Anthropocene, invites participants to consider the ways in which agency intersects with the environment.
Join us for talks by graduate students across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, plus a keynote address from UW–Madison alumna Sarah Dimick.
The symposium is free and open to the public. Faculty, students, researchers, and community members are warmly invited to attend.
Schedule
8–8:30 a.m.
Coffee and pastries
8:30–8:40 a.m.
Welcome remarks
8:45–10 a.m.
Panel 1: Ecologies of Care
Discussant: Maria Lepowsky
- Nomalanga Dube: “The intersections between Sexual Reproductive Health Rights and climate change: A case study”
- Ellie Kincaid: “Reading Trans*corporeally”
- Hamilton Wilson: “Trans Solidarities and Agencies at Worlds Ends”
- Leo Kin-Chong Chao: “Building a Queer Eco-Village in Southwest China”
10:15–11:15 a.m.
Sarah Dimick: “The Missing Things People”
Keynote Address
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Lunch
12:45–2 p.m.
Panel 2: Literary Studies in the Anthropocene
Discussant: Mario Ortiz-Robles
- Sragdharamalini Das: “Dissolving Desires: Planetary Recognition of the Subaltern as the Other of Rivers, the Brother of Man”
- Qiyun Zhang: “The Fond Gaze of a Naturalist: Looking through the Aquarium”
- Benjamin Hawkins: “Today and Tomorrow: Two Stories of Agency in the Anthropocene”
- Theo Joy Campbell: “Deity as Machine as Deity: Human and Beyond-Human Agency in Midnight Robber”
2:15–3:15 p.m.
Panel 3: Elemental Ecologies “Lightning” Panel
Discussant: Samer Alatout
- Dylan Couch: “Unsettled Ecologies: Reading the Wild Edges of Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”
- Rebecca Laurent: “White (Houseplant) Saviors: Agency, Angst, and Plant Care in the Anthropocene”
- Ian Morse: “Reverberations of geologic life in the scaffold of climate action”
- Benjamin Chin-Hung Kao: “Kuma Strikes Back: Linguistic Representations of Bears as Contemporary Japan’s Conjunctural Reality”
- Anupama Kumar: “‘There is a great future in plastics’: Can private capital’s involvement in waste management shape women’s livelihoods in India?”
- Taimur Ahmad: “How Do You Interview a River? Translating the Social Role of Natural Entities”
3:30–4:45 p.m.
Panel 4: Resilient Foodways, Resilient Communities
Discussant: Elizabeth Hennessy
- Khanh Nguyen: “Twentieth Century Hydraulic Infrastructures and the Flow of Modernity: From Egypt to Indochina”
- Louis J. Aquino: “Farming For Puerto Rico: Envisioning Sovereign Foodways”
- Abigayle Brooks and Anthony Ippolito: “From Raising Resistance: The Dual of Development Between the Soy State and Paraguayan Campesinos”
- Phuong-Quyen Nguyen: “Trong Đầm Lầy Có Sen: Resilience of the Mekong Delta and Its People”
About Sarah Dimick
Sarah Dimick is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, jointly appointed in English and the Environmental Policy and Culture Program. Her research, based in Anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, focuses on literary portrayals of climate change and environmental justice.
Her first book, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures, was published by Columbia University Press in 2024 and short-listed for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. She co-edits the University of Virginia Press’s Under the Sign of Nature series.
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