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Revisiting the Elgin Marbes: A Materialist Perspective
10 September - 10 October 2024
Biography
As a materialist ecocritic, Dewey W. Hall is Professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA. where he has taught for the past two decades. He has written extensively on Romanticism, Victorian Studies, New Materialism, and Early Environmental History. Major publications in these fields include: Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789-1912 (2014); Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies (2016); Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice (2017); Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020). He has served in various capacities with major organizations, which include the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), and currently the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) on the planning committee to convene NASSR 2026 in Los Angeles.
As part of his engagement with the broader research community, he gave a keynote address titled “The Ecology of the Goslar Verses: Weather, Pico Viejo, and Material Objects” to a gathering of international scholars at German Society for English Romanticism Conference 2022 held in Augsburg, Germany, which has been published by the noteworthy German publisher Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT) in Romantic Ecologies: Selected Papers from the Augsburg Conference (October 2023). Currently, his typescript titled “The Political Ecology of Matter: Marbles, Volcanoes, and Humans” is forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1810s (Cambridge UP, 2024). Further, he has been working on a series of lectures, which he plans to deliver at the University of Bristol hosted by the English Department, featuring his project “Revisiting the Elgin Marbles: A Materialist Approach” as part of the Next Generation Visiting Researcher Programme. The lectures are derived from his ongoing book project Materialist Romanticism: The Matter of the Marbles (forthcoming 2025).
Research Summary
The time in residence at the University of Bristol will provide Professor Hall with the opportunity to share his materialist research about the geology, quarrying, and provenance of the Elgin marbles while discussing the impact of the artifacts during the 1810s upon various writers and artists such as John Keats, Lord Byron, and Benjamin Robert Haydon. In addition, Professor Hall aims to comment on the political ecology surrounding the 1816 Parliament purchase of the Elgin marbles in the context of famine and fever in the aftermath of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption.
The visit will be hosted by Professor Ralph Pite, Centre for Environmental Humanities, English Department. During the visit, Professor Hall plans to collaborate with the Cabot Institute for the Environment in hopes of co-hosting a panel of ecocritics and environmental specialists to discuss the “Significance of the Humanities in an Age of Climate Change.” In addition, he anticipates connecting with UoB faculty affiliated with the Centre for Environmental Humanities to engage in an exchange of ideas to discern the place of the humanities in response to the Anthropocene. Professor Hall plans to offer a lecture to the greater academic community titled “The Ecology of Hopkins’s ‘Remarkable Sunsets’ and Ruskin’s ‘Storm-Cloud’ Lectures (1884): Krakatau, Weather, and Climate Change.” The activities aim to accomplish the following objectives:
Planned Activities: Lectures
Open Lecture: The Ecology of Hopkins' 'Remarkable Sunsets' and Ruskin's 'Storm-Cloud' Lectures (1883-1884): Krakatau, Weather and Climate Change
Volcanic matter really matters. Whether we reference the Laki Icelandic eruption in 1783–1784, which Benjamin Franklin mistakenly identified as a weather-disrupting force emerging from Hekla, that resulted in famine and led arguably to the French Revolution in 1789,[i] or call attention to the Pico Viejo eruption in 1798 that led to one of the worst freezes during the eighteenth century, which inspired Wordsworth’s Goslar verses and his famed Lucy poems,[ii] or stand in awe of the Tambora eruption on Sumbawa, Indonesia in April 1815, which Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles chronicled in his Transactions of the Batavian Society (1816),[iii] causing the year without a summer in 1816, volcanic activity can have profound effects upon the atmosphere, climate and humanity. As my paper will argue, two noteworthy Victorians chronicled effects upon the atmosphere evident in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s 'The Remarkable Sunsets' published in Nature in December 1883 and John Ruskin’s 'The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century' featuring two lectures delivered in February 1884. While Hopkins is commenting on observable phenomenon, Ruskin discusses, which is not fully known to him, what he calls the 'plague cloud' or meteorological portent emerging across the English skyline, which derives its source in part from anthropogenic emissions and, as I argue, the 1883 Krakatau eruption. Though both authors observed the effects sourced from the same phenomenon—one as an observer and the other as a harbinger of destruction—Ruskin’s alarm 140 years ago anticipates the climate-disrupting impact that anthropogenic and geophysical forces can have upon the biosphere.
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[i] Benjamin Franklin, “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (May 1784). Date Accessed November 27, 2023. Founders Online National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-42-02-0184. See also Ellen R. Cohen, ed. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, March 1 through August 15, 1784 (New Haven: Yale University Press), vol. 42, 289–294.
[ii] Dewey W. Hall, “The Ecology of the Goslar Verses: Weather, Pico Viejo, and Material Objects,” in Romantic Ecologies: Selected Papers from the Augsburg Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism, edited by David Kerler and Martin Middeke (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2023): 127–148.
[iii] David Higgins, British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene: Writing Tambora (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 23–54.
Open Lecture
The Ecology of Hopkins' 'Remarkable Sunsets' and Ruskin's 'Storm-Cloud' Lectures (1883-1884): Krakatau, Weather and Climate Change
Audience: Centre for Environmental Humanities, Bristol Academic Community and School of Humanities
Date & time: 25 September 2024, 15:00-17:00
Location: Arts Complex (Room TBC)
Open Lecture
The Political Ecology of Matter: Marbles, Volcanoes, and Humans
Professor Hall will discuss the confluence of material objects during the 1810s, especially when Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in 1815 spewing ash into the stratosphere, and when Thomas Bruce (1766–1841), the 7th Earl of Elgin, sold the Parthenon marbles to the British Parliament for £35,000 in 1816. While these two events were continents apart geographically, they are interconnected materially and politically. Marble rock, ash, and potato, an assemblage of disparate objects, mark the tumultuous 1810s as a decade in which matter matters significantly to humanity.
Audience: Bristol academic community, Centre for Environmental Humanities, School of Geographical Sciences, School of Humanities
Tentative Date: TBC
Departmental Lecture
Marble as Material Form: Geology, Quarrying, and Provenance
Professor Hall will comment on the materiality of marble from the Attica Greece. The lecture will discuss the geology of the region, various quarries at Mount Pentelicus and Mount Hymettus, and issues regarding provenance derived from the marble-quarry relationship.
Audience: School of Humanities, School of Earth Sciences, and the Cabot Institute
Tentative Date: TBC
Lecture/Seminar
Marveling over the Marbles: Artistic Responses
Professor Hall will discuss artistic responses to the Parthenon sculptures that will include Benjamin Robert Haydon’s sketches and ekphrastic poetry written by Lord Byron and John Keats. In particular, Haydon’s sketch of the horse of Selene will be featured with Keats’s sonnets and Byron’s “Curse of Minerva” as part of a materialist approach in response to the Parthenon sculptures.
Audience: School of Humanities: English, History, and History of Art
Date & time: 8 October 2024, 15:00-16:30
Location: TBC
The confirmed details of Professor Hall's lectures and seminars will be listed on our Events page in due course. You can also contact Professor Hall's host for further information.
