I am delighted to yet again announce that on Thursday, October 17 at 7:00 p.m. in Anderson Theater at Hartwick College, distinguished critic Anna Kornbluh will be delivering the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College, which will be titled: “Historical Fictions, Heist Flicks, and other Climate Genres for a Burning World.” Kornbluh’s lecture will be followed by a reading by eminent poet and feminist critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis and is part of the Oneonta Literary Festival.

Historical Fictions, Heist Flicks, and other Climate Genres for a Burning World

In the urgent emergency of climate crisis, is there any time for art? This talk considers some of the pressures on literature and culture at present, exploring the prevailing ways that artists, authors, and critics are conceiving artistic ties to the environment, and proposing some alternative ties with the help of popular genres like historical fiction and heist films.

Anna Kornbluh is professor of English and a member of the United Faculty bargaining team at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where her research and teaching focus on the novel, film, and critical theory. She is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Realist Form (Fordham University Press, 2014), Marxist Film Theory and “Fight Club” (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, and Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, which was recently published by Verso. She has edited special issues for b2o: an online journal, Criticism, Mediations, and Syndicate, and is a frequent guest on The American Vandal and other podcasts. She is the founder of the V21 Collective and InterCcECT (Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory) and is the Director of Graduate Studies at UIC.