Session: 6d
Day: Friday 17 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.17
Chair: Lena Pfeifer (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg)
Stefano Rozzoni (University of Bergamo), “Resistant Trees in Simon Armitage’s (Eco)Poems (2019–2024)”
Abstract: Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom since 2019, has established himself as a leading contemporary voice attentive to the textures of everyday life while engaging persistently with urgent cultural and political questions, including the ecological crisis. As he has stated, “When I became Poet Laureate in 2019, I made the environment a cornerstone of my work and my activities” (Thomas 2023, n.p.). This declaration underscores the centrality of environmental concerns within his recent oeuvre, where themes of nature, justice, and survival are consistently foregrounded. In particular, Armitage’s poetry develops a deliberate and often uncompromising ecopoetics, in which trees emerge as emblematic figures of resilience and resistance.
This paper examines a selection of poems published between 2019 and 2024 in which trees occupy a central and recurring role. Through my paper I argue that these texts show how the trope of the tree functions as a site of resistance, offering both a record of the natural world’s persistence in the face of ecological crisis and a model of ethical relationality that extends the scope of justice beyond the human domain.
The discussion will focus on three poems: ‘Plum Tree Among the Skyscrapers’ (2024), included in a National Trust commissioned anthology title Blossomise, situates a solitary tree in the artificial environment of a city square, where the tree resists erasure by outshining its surroundings, staging a performance of survival and vitality that disrupts urban monotony and affirms nature’s enduring presence. ‘The Holy Land’ (2023), first published on Instagram in response to the deliberate felling of a historic sycamore, frames the act as an injustice against both cultural memory and the environment, while navigating questions of guilt, responsibility, and reparation, proposing a form of restorative justice enacted through remembrance, renewal, and the generative potential of nature itself. Finally, ‘Fugitives’ (2019), composed for the celebration of National Landscapes, presents ancient trees as witnesses and custodians of the land: By granting them “citizenship,” the poem imagines an ecological polity where trees assert rights and responsibilities, embodying a vision of justice that encompasses the non-human world.
Bio: Stefano Rozzoni, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Literary and Cultural Studies and Lecturer at the University of Bergamo, Italy. His transdisciplinary work—spanning literature, economics, and posthuman philosophy—focuses on environmental narratives in Anglophone literature and culture across diverse periods, media, and themes, including the pastoral. He is the Principal Investigator of the research network N.E.S.T. Research Network. Narratives in Environmental and Sustainable Transitions, funded by the European Union (NextGenerationEU) and the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR). Since 2024, he has also served as a member of the Advisory Board of EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment).
Rosamund Paice (Northumbria University), “‘How many stately oaks must buy a fan?’ Brian Fairfax’s rewriting of Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’”
Abstract: In his celebrated country house poem, ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1651), Andrew Marvell depicted Mary Fairfax as the genius loci of her father’s estate grounds. The sole-surviving child of the parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–1671), Marvell’s Mary is ‘like a sprig of Misleto’ that ‘On the Fairfacian Oak does grow’. Twenty years later, Thomas died and left his estate to Mary and the end of the 1670s, Nun Appleton’s oaks were being cut down by Marvell’s ‘Blest Nymph’.
Mary’s act of deforestation is recorded in poems by her second cousin, Brian Fairfax, ‘The Vocal Oak’ and ‘The Oak’s Petition’ (1679), in which Brian ventriloquises an oak planted by her father. This paper will show how Brian’s poems rework Marvell’s motifs to mount an attack on the ‘Missletow’ in the voice of a ‘Fairfacian Oak’ — an oak planted by and representing Thomas and his environmental care.
Where Marvell’s poem characterises Mary-as-mistletoe as the ‘sacred Bud’ of the Druids, in Brian’s poem Mary’s parasitic ‘Luxury and Pride’ fuels the estate’s deforestation. Marvell’s mower ‘unknowing, carves the Rail’ and ‘does his stroke detest’; cut grass and sliced bird lie silent. Brian overwrites the act of haymaking for animal feed (Marvel’s mowers) with the felling of trees to fund a lavish lifestyle. He describes an axe wielded so keenly that ‘Oakes are mown down like grass at its command’ and his anthropomorphised oak is passionately vocal in its petition for the deforestation to cease.
Bio: Dr Rosamund (Rosie) Paice is a Visiting Scholar at Northumbria University and Membership Secretary for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland). Her monograph Milton’s Loves was published by Routledge in 2023 and she is currently working on a monograph on writing green and blue spaces in British country estates, entitled Lost Ground: Literature and the British Estate, 1639–1742.
Soolmaz Moeini, “Modern Agriculture, Multispecies (In)Justice, and Environmental Migration in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Rural Narratives”
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s rural novels, particularly The Stories of Baba Sobhan and The Missing Soluch, capture the violent transformation of Iranian village life under the pressure of modern agricultural reforms and mechanized farming. While framed as progress, these policies fracture long-standing relationships between humans, animals, and land. Dowlatabadi’s narratives dramatize how the introduction of tractors, state-led irrigation projects, and market-oriented production displace not only peasants but also animals, traditional crops, and ecological rhythms.
This paper argues that Dowlatabadi’s fiction offers a powerful case study of multispecies (in)justice. Environmental injustice in these texts operates on multiple levels: marginalized rural families face economic precarity and forced migration; animals and livestock are rendered obsolete and often destroyed; soils and watersheds are depleted under extractive farming practices. By foregrounding these entangled losses, Dowlatabadi moves beyond a strictly human-centered critique to register the suffering and resistance of more-than-human actors.
Placing Dowlatabadi in dialogue with frameworks of Environmental Justice and Multispecies Justice, I show how his novels anticipate contemporary concerns about ecological displacement and climate migration. His texts reveal how agrarian modernization produces both human and nonhuman refugees—families leaving their ancestral lands, animals discarded as useless, and landscapes abandoned to erosion.
By situating Dowlatabadi’s rural narratives within global ecocritical debates, this paper demonstrates how Persian literature articulates a distinctly local yet transnational vision of environmental injustice. It suggests that literary studies can expose the multispecies dimensions of forced migration, making visible the shared vulnerabilities of humans, animals, and ecosystems in the Anthropocene.
Bio: Dr. Soolmaz Moeini is a researcher and scholar specializing in environmental criticism and comparative studies within Persian literature. Based in Strasbourg, she holds a PhD in Persian literature and has published books and academic articles on ecological and environmental themes. An experienced peer reviewer, Dr. Moeini actively contributes to advancing scholarship at the intersection of literature, environmental studies, and comparative analysis.
Michael Markwick, “Shadowtime Ecologies: Caterpillars, Bones, and Unstable Landscapes in the Painterly Imagination”
Abstract: For my recent solo presentation, Mum, do caterpillars go to heaven? (C U AT SADKA, Kraków, 2025), I developed a new body of abstract, visceral paintings that stage co-being across human and nonhuman life. These works include both skeletal figures from my ongoing Earth Being series and shifting landscapes, anchored by a new large painting of a caterpillar ascending toward a white sun.
In these paintings, landscapes waver between solidity and disappearance, caught in cycles of violence, transformation, and renewal. A punk-like apocalyptic choreography unfolds: a skeletal figure embraces a tree; a burning sun hovers over withering plants; water rises as branches snap and regenerate. A caterpillar—innocent yet defiant—emerges as a figure of shared vulnerability and fragile hope. The titular question, Do caterpillars go to heaven?, employs anthropomorphism strategically—not to humanize the nonhuman, but to expose the limits of human categories and to imagine transcendence as more-than-human.
Rather than reducing the nonhuman to backdrop or allegory, these paintings bring caterpillars, trees, bones, and suns into precarious co-existence with us. They ask what futures we can imagine once we accept our lives as already entangled with nonhuman others. This vision draws on shadowtime—a temporal drift in which the future feels stalled and the past refuses to recede. Here, death and rebirth remain inseparable: a caterpillar soars, bones merge with trees, and even amid collapse, renewal pushes upward.
The process-based materiality—digging, cutting, drilling, scraping, and layering paint with silk, sand, straw, and wood—shapes the painterly presence of the works. In doing so, the imagery brushes against ongoing debates on multispecies (in)justice, spectral ecologies, and the imagining of other-than-human communities.
In this way, painting becomes a language for shadowtime ecologies: an imagined revelatory vision in which interwoven realities collapse and renew, holding space for empathy and hope.
Bio: Michael Markwick is a Berlin-based painter whose work explores ecological entanglements and post-human realities through process-driven material practices. His recent exhibitions have been at venues such as Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis (Bregenz), Kunstforum Montafon (Schruns), and C U AT SADKA (Kraków). A member of the EASLCE, he brings the perspective of a full-time artistic practice to ecocritical dialogue, presenting his work internationally in galleries, universities, and cultural institutions.