PLAYWRIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENT, NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT: VISIONS AND REVISIONS

November 16-17, 2023
Svenska institutet i Rom / Instituto svedese di studi classici a Roma

As this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature reminds us, playwriting is a socially-embedded form attuned to shifting cultural, political, and, of course, natural ecologies. The environmental question has long been taken up by playwrights in different modes and through a diversity of textual formats. For the purposes of this conference we are concentrating on playwrights and texts from the nineteenth century to the present, aiming to revisit the pioneers that have rightly featured prominently in academic discourses and theatre programming, probing their ground-breaking contribution. At the same time, we are aiming to recognise and reveal voices less commonly heard, and writers less visible. The conference will probe histories of visual and textual representations of environments, atmospheres and climates to ask what it means to be a visionary and revisionist playwright, and how this links to other theatrical, artistic and literary forms across history, especially at our time of dramatic climate crisis.

Please register by 20 October: registration link

Download the full programme of the conference HERE