Our new Director of Undergraduate Studies, Professor Jesse Oak Taylor, is a coeditor of an essay collection--Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times--that has just been published by Penn State University Press.
The volume explores the long-standing dialogue between imaginative literature and the earth sciences and show how scientists, novelists, and poets represent intersections of geological and human timescales, the deep past and a posthuman future, political exigency and the carbon cycle. Among the authors discussed are Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Henry David Thoreau, and J.M. Coetzee.
The word Anthropocene in the title refers to a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, human-induced climate change.