Underworlds and undercurrents: Approaching extractive history from below
Room C218, Newman Building and online
Apr 17, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm
Dr Adam Bridgen (Durham) will deliver the fifth seminar, ‘Underworlds and undercurrents: Approaching extractive history from below’, in our Methodologies concerning Extractivism series on Wednesday 17 April at 4pm. The seminar will be held in Room c218 of the UCD Newman Building and online.
Abstract: Some of the world’s most extensive extractive regimes emerged in Britain during the period 1770-1830, fuelling the first stages of the manufacturing boom commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution. Certain more visible sites of extraction—such as the Parys opencast copper mine in Wales—became places of significant cultural and artistic interest, featuring in fashionable domestic tours of Britain. From this emerged a plethora of landscape paintings, travel accounts, and poems that influence how we visualise extraction to the present day. While shedding a light on these industries, this early interest in extraction was nevertheless shaped by a specific set of social values and aesthetic forms. This talk takes a different approach to the visualisation of extraction, looking to working-class writers and artists working in or adjacent to extractive industries. Taking a comparative, class-based approach, I argue, reveals an undercurrent of different imaginings of extraction, its social and environmental impacts, than hitherto recognised.
Dr Adam Bridgen is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. His research project (2024-27) explores working-class literary responses to natural resource extraction during the British Romantic period. More broadly, he is interested in the social dimensions of anti-imperial and environmental thought across the long eighteenth century, recently publishing essays in Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (2022) and Animal Theologians (2023). He is currently co-editing a volume of collected essays, British Working-Class and Radical Writing since 1700, forthcoming with University of London Press.
For online attendance please register via the link below.
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