Red Lists, Databases, and the Poetics of Species Extinction
Humankind is currently confronted with what some biologists call the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, and the first one triggered by humans. In response, scientists are creating comprehensive databases of all biological species on Earth and classifying them by their degree of endangerment. Using the tools of literary and cultural interpretation as well as new analytical methods developed in the Digital Humanities, I approach these databases as cultural artifacts, a contemporary form of epic that aims to inventory all known biological life forms. Red Lists, in turn, spell out perceptions of risk that have cultural as well as scientific dimensions. As part of my current book project, Cultures of Extinction: Narrative, Database, and Biodiversity Loss, I explore how global biodiversity databases and Red Lists compare to, complement and contradict the elegiac and tragic modes of narrative that are often used in representations of species extinction in novels, travel narratives, popular scientific books, films, photographs, and paintings. Cultures of Extinction also analyzes Endangered Species laws in a variety of countries from a comparative perspective so as to show how they negotiate the interface between science, politics and culture in the face of environmental crisis.
Ursula Heise is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.
"Ecocriticism and Animation"
MLA Convention, Seattle, January 8, 2012
"Species at Risk: Narrative, Red Lists, and the Biodiversity Crisis"
Keynote, Conference on The Shaping Power of Risk: Literature, Culture, Environment, University of Bayreuth, Germany, February, 24–26 2012
Ursula K. Heise is Professor of English and Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Her major academic interests focus on environmental culture, literature and art in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan, and on theories of modernization, postmodernization and globalization. Her book Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism appeared from Cambridge University Press in 1997, and Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global from Oxford University Press in 2008. Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture) will appear with the German publisher Suhrkamp in 2010 (English to follow). She is also working on a book provisionally entitled The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature.