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Extreme weather events combined with developments in meteorology and climatology to create a canvas of interpretive possibilities for 19th-century British writers to frame ethical and ecological critiques of industrial modernity. Literary texts helped shape a new understanding of Britain's climate as globally interconnected and increasingly driven, and possibly imperiled, by human activity.
Related papers
Adeline Johns-Putra, ed., Climate and Literature (2019)
Ecozon@ - European Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Environment, 2020
“Casualties and Disasters”: Defoe and the Interpretation of Climatic Instability
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2008
The Great Storm of November 26-27, 1703, that struck Southern England and Wales became a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century for the destructive potential of Nature. This article examines Daniel Defoe's 1704 text The Storm, a compilation of reports of damage from across England that Defoe prefaced with a long introductory essay about his own experiences and speculations about the causes of the disaster. Defoe and his correspondents offer important analyses of the relations among humankind, landscape, and climate, even as they set their remarks in the context of eighteenth-century theology. Ultimately, The Storm seeks to reconcile its scientific and religious impulses by resorting to an eco-cultural materialism that emphasizes the complex feedback loops between landscape, climate, and human activities. X T he Great Storm of November 26-27, 1703, that struck Southern England and Wales became a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century for the destructive power of Nature directed by a chastising God. 1 Preaching on the thirtieth anniversary of the storm, Andrew Gifford called it "the most terrible Desolation of [its] kind that ever was known in the Memory of Man, or recorded in any History" (24). Survivors observed memorial days of prayer and fasting on the anniversary of the storm, and annual sermons to commemorate the dead continued well into the nineteenth century-reiterating the theological commonplace that "the tempest" was evidence of God's "great and terrible Judgment" and a forewarning to sinners that "the desolations which have been made in the earth" presaged the Day of Judgment (Stinton, Sermon 5; Pritchard, Desolations 28). In crucial markley X 103 ways, all of these sermons are indebted to, and often draw explicitly on, Daniel Defoe's The Storm: Or, a Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which Happen'd in the Late Dreadful Tempest Both by Sea and Land (1704), a unique compilation of eyewitness accounts that Defoe advertised for, assembled, and prefaced with a long essay describing his own experiences and reporting the tolls of destruction and death from across Britain. Published in two editions, The Storm remains a vital source of information for climatologists and historians; by marshalling the resources of early eighteenth-century print culture-the periodical advertisement and correspondents' letters-Defoe summarizes what statistics he could find and provides often striking vignettes of the destruction that occurred on November 27. His commitment to empirical verification reflects his solid understanding of the protocols of natural philosophy at the turn of the eighteenth century. "We have endeavour'd to furnish our selves with the most authentick Accounts we could from all Parts of the Nation," Defoe told his readers, and assured them that "a great many worthy Gentleman have contributed their Assistance in various, and some very exact Relations and curious Remarks" (69). In confronting the effects of this and other storms that ravaged England in the early eighteenth century, these "very exact Relations" superimpose empirical and theological interpretations: Defoe and his contributors justify their efforts to understand the physical forces that led to the "casualties and disasters" of 1703 with typological readings of their causes. In the process, The Storm reveals the complex ways in which our understanding of climate-in the twenty-first century as well as the eighteenth-both shapes and is shaped by a range of ecological, socioeconomic, and metaphysical values and assumptions. Although hardly one of Defoe's most popular works, The Storm is a historically significant effort to register the "exact" and "curious" perceptions of the unsettled weather that characterized the early modern period. In its emphasis on eyewitness reports, the "virtual witnessing" that characterizes emerging notions of scientific methodology, his text describes some of the ways in which conditions during the Little Ice Age (c. 1350-1850)-a period of shorter springs and growing seasons, longer winters, and often abrupt and violent shifts in weather patterns-shaped larger perceptions of "Nature" itself. 2 In the first section of this article, I explore the problems of representing the storm in 1703 and reconstructing its causes and effects three hundred years later by using cutting-edge climatological models. If the survivors, including Defoe himself, repeatedly maintain that no description
‘restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS’: Early Twentieth-Century Visions of Climatic Change
Modernist Cultures, 2021
Prompted by Wyndham Lewis's call in BLAST for a ‘USEFUL LITTLE CHEMIST’ to ‘restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS’, this paper considers the conceptions of climate and climatic change – natural and anthropogenic – that were in circulation in the early twentieth century. Engaging with the writing of scientists, journalists, novelists, and avant-garde polemicists, it examines early twentieth-century iterations of the notion that climate determines culture, the period's awareness of past climatic changes, the theories advanced to explain these changes, and the attitudes taken towards the possibility of human-induced climatic change.
"You could sense the heat coming": Climate and Weather in David Chariandy's Brother
AQCL/ACQL (Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures/Association des littératures canadienne et québécoise), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2019
'Telling a different tale': literary, historical and meteorological readings of a Norfolk heatwave
2011
Articulated initially by physical scientists, the idea of anthropogenic global climate change has been subject to increasingly diverse examinations in recent years. The idea has been appropriated by economists, worked with by engineers and, more recently, scrutinised by social scientists and humanities scholars. Underlying these examinations are different, yet rarely exposed, presumptions about what kind of ‘thing’ climate is: a physical abstraction, a statistical construct, an imaginative idea. If the ontological status of climate is rarely made explicit it becomes difficult to know whether the different epistemologies used to reveal climates – and their changing properties – are appropriate. This study offers one way in which the different worlds inhabited by the idea of climate may be revealed. It does so by examining a heatwave: a powerful meteorological phenomenon one would think and one which scientific accounts of climate change tell us will become more frequent in the future. The heatwave in question occurred in July 1900 in the county of Norfolk, England. This heatwave inhabits three very different worlds: the imaginative world of L P Hartley in his novel The Go Between; the historical world of late Victorian Norfolk; and the digital world of the climate sciences. The traces of the heatwave left in these different worlds are varied and access to them is uneven. Constructing an adequate interpretation of this singular climatic event and its meaning is challenging. The study suggests that grasping the idea of climate may be harder than we think. Climates may be ineffable. Yet the approach to the study of climate illustrated here opens up new ways of thinking about the meaning and significance of climate change.
British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene
British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene, 2017
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
"Weather," The Philosopher 110, no. 1 (Winter 2022): 62-66. Special Issue on The Planet.
Strange weather is one of the growing ways human beings experience climate change phenomenologically or beyond abstract scientific data. Even those who do not “believe” in climate change experience it. Odd weather is also one of first things human beings talk about with one another or share, today and at least since the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This article considers how increasingly violent weather is ushering in a new type of narrative and art and announcing a new political and climatic regime. It considers a series of contemporary works of art about strange weather as a more precise example or microcosm of a certain reinvention of epic in our time. It then considers how this shared narrative of violent weather is intruding on, disrupting, and reconfiguring our political systems at the same time as it is collectivizing, historicizing, and politicizing the public before the growing threat of climate change.
Reading and Writing the Weather
In this paper I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of the current ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognises the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematise the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematises the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility.
A Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction
Extrapolation, 2018
The paper argues that contemporary climate fiction is a subgenre of sf rather than a distinct and separate genre for two main reasons: first, because its texts and practitioners relate primarily to the sf "selective tradition"; and, second, because its texts and practitioners articulate a "structure of feeling" that accords centrality to science and technology, in this case normally climate science. Not only is "cli-fi" best understood as sf, it also has a much longer history than is commonly allowed, one that arguably stretches back to antiquity. The paper distinguishes between texts in which extreme climate change is represented as anthropogenic and those where it is represented as theogenic, geogenic, or xenogenic; it also provides a brief sketch of the (pre-)history of stories of anthropogenic, xenogenic, and geogenic extreme climate change.
MICHAEL CHARLES VERDERAME
2637 West Lunt Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60645
mcverderame@gmail.com
773-241-1965
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in English Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2017.
Specialization: British Literature 1750-1900
Minor: Gender and Women’s Studies
Certificate in Critical and Interpretive Theory
Dissertation: “Science, Politics, and Soul-Making: The Romantic Encounter with Climate
Change” (director: Gillen Wood)
Extreme weather events combined with developments in meteorology and climatology to create
a canvas of interpretive possibilities for 19th-century British writers to frame ethical and
ecological critiques of industrial modernity. Literary texts helped shape a new understanding of
Britain’s climate as globally interconnected and increasingly driven, and possibly imperiled, by
human activity.
M.S. in Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, August 2014.
M.A. in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2008.
J.D., Tulane Law School, New Orleans, May 2003.
B.A. in English and Philosophy, University of New Orleans, December 2003.
ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT
Touro University (Hebrew Theological College & Blitstein Institute), Skokie, IL
Assistant Dean and Assistant Professor of English, 2017-present
Instructor in English, 2014-2017
Harper College, Palatine, IL
Adjunct Professor of English, 2014-2015
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL
Graduate Assistant, 2009-2010 and 2013-2014
Graduate Instructor, 2006-2013
Research Assistant, 2007 and 2009
Teaching Assistant, 2007-2008
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PUBLICATIONS
DIGITAL EDITED COLLECTION
New Directions in Ecocriticism (co-edited with Gillen Wood). Urbana, Illinois: Illinois Digital
Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship, 2011. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/
handle/2142/25241.
ESSAYS AND NOTES
“On Countee Cullen’s ‘To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time.’’ Modern American Poetry Site. Ed.
Cary Nelson and Bartholomew Brinkman. 2012. http://www.english.illinois.edu/
maps/poets/a_f/cullen/to_john_keats.html
“Introduction: Towards a Third Wave of Ecocriticism.” New Directions in Ecocriticism.
Ed. Gillen Wood and Michael Verderame. Urbana, Illinois: Illinois Digital
Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship, 2011. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/
handle/2142/25241.
“What Do Graduate Employee Unions Have To Do With Academic Freedom?” AAUP Journal of
Academic Freedom Vol. 2 (2011). https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Verderame.pdf.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLES
“The Laki Eruption of 1783.” Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Climate and History. Ed. Brian C.
Black, David M. Hassenzahl, Jennie C. Stephens, Gary Weisel, and Nancy Gift. New York:
ABC-CLIO, 2013.
“Meteorology in the 19th Century.” Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Climate and History. Ed.
Brian C. Black, David M. Hassenzahl, Jennie C. Stephens, Gary Weisel, and Nancy Gift..
New York: ABC-CLIO, 2013.
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality, by Peter Otto. Studies in
Romanticism. 52.1 (Summer 2013): 147-50.
Review of Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by Ashton Nichols. College Literature 39.3 (Summer 2012):
171-3.
Review of Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790-1805, by Miriam L. Wallace.
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 53.1 (Spring 2012): 129-33.
Review of War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime, by Mary Favret.
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net #60 (November 2011). https://www.erudit.org/en/
journals/ravon/2011-n59-60-ravon0382/1013281ar/.
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Review of Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination, by John Parham.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.3 (Summer 2011): 692-4.
WEBLOG
st
“Facing Climate Change in the 21 Century.” Weblog. Sponsored by the Humanities, Arts, Sciences,
and Technology Advanced Collaboratory Scholars Program, 2009-2010.
www.hastac.org/users/mcverderame
RESPONSE PAPERS
Invited Response Paper to Paul Kahn’s “On Criminals, Enemies, and Enemy Combatants.”
Symposium of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, UIUC.
http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/05/bios-life-death-politics-on-criminals.html
Invited Response Paper to Melissa Orlie’s “There Is No Alternative.”
Symposium of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, UIUC.
http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2009/01/there-is-no-alternative.html
UNDER REVIEW
“We Are As Clouds: Climate and Social Transformation in Shelley.”
CONFERENCE PAPERS
“Keats’s Suburban Poetics.” North American Association for the Study of Romanticism,
Boston, August 5, 2013.
“Teaching Austen in Prison.” Modern Language Association, Boston, January 8, 2013.
“Shelley’s Vision of Climate Change.” Modern Language Association, Seattle, January 6, 2012.
“Scholarship, Pedagogy, Public Service: How Today’s Graduate Students Are Using the Crisis
in the Academy to Remake Academic Citizenship.” Midwest MLA, St. Louis, November 6,
2011.
“‘A Rapid Masque of Death’: Shelley and the Tambora Eruption.” North American Society
for the Study of Romanticism, Park City, Utah, August 13, 2011. (Received 2nd-place
award for best graduate essay at conference).
“A Historically Informed Pedagogy of Environmental Justice.” Association for the Study of
Literature and the Environment, Bloomington, Indiana, June 24, 2011.
“One Vast Eye: Meteorology, Liberalism, and Empire in Ruskin.” British Geographies Conference,
Urbana, Illinois, February 19, 2011.
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“The Enlightenment as Ecocritical Bogeyman: Reclaiming the Enlightenment Spirit as a Basis for
Sustainability Discourse.” Sustainability in the Americas Conference, Urbana, Illinois,
February 11, 2011.
“Graduate Employee Organizations and the Struggle for Academic Freedom.” Modern Language
Association Convention, Los Angeles, January 8, 2011.
th
“A Conspiracy of Nations: Meteorology as Globalization in the 19 Century.” Society for Literature,
Science, and the Arts, Indianapolis, October 29, 2010.
“The Art of Living in the Anthropocene Age.” Climate Change Across the Disciplines, Unit for
Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Urbana, Illinois, March 15, 2010.
“‘Portentous, Unexampled, Unexplained’: Climate and the City in Cowper’s The Task.” International
Conference on Romanticism, New York City, November 6, 2009.
“Cowper’s The Task and the Summer Fog of 1783.” Religion, Secularism, and Nationhood
Conference, Urbana, Illinois, April 4, 2009.
“Love and Fame in Felicia Hemans’s Poetry.” Competing Modernities Conference, Urbana,
Illinois, April 28, 2007.
“Gender Dynamics in the Professional Writing Classroom.” Articulations Conference, Urbana,
Illinois, April 21, 2007.
FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS
Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2012-2013.
The Graduate College’s most prestigious competitive fellowship, awarded to approximately
two dozen students across the entire University.
Nina Baym Dissertation Fellowship, 2012-2013.
English Department Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2012-2013 (declined).
English Department Fellowship, 2011-2012.
Donald A. Smalley Fellowship, 2010-11.
Liberal Arts and Sciences College Fellowship, UIUC, 2010-11.
English Department/Graduate College Summer Research Fellowship, UIUC, Summer 2010.
Graduate College Travel Grant, Fall 2009 and Fall 2010.
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AWARDS AND HONORS
nd
2 -place Best Graduate Student Essay, North American Association for the Study of Romanticism,
2011.
UIUC List of Teachers Rated Excellent by Their Students, 2009-2012
Named six times to campus-wide honor list based on excellent student evaluations.
Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory Scholars, 2009-2010.
Competitive scholarship awarded to participate in an online community of interdisciplinary
Scholars sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation
Moot Court Appellate Team, Tulane Law School, 2000-2001 and 2001-2002.
Part of a three-person team that placed third in appellate competition, with the highest-ranked
written brief
CALI Award for Highest Grade in First Amendment Law, Tulane Law School, 2000.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
COURSES AS INSTRUCTOR OF RECORD
(* = named to List of Instructors Rated Excellent; ** = Named Outstanding (Top 10%))
Literature
**Introduction to Poetry, University of Illinois and Touro
*Introduction to Drama, University of Illinois
Introduction to Fiction (Advanced Composition, University of Illinois
Introduction to Literary Study for English Majors), University of Illinois
*Romantic Literature and Culture, University of Illinois
British Romanticism and the Harlem Renaissance, Danville Correctional Center through the
University of Illinois Education Justice Project
Composition and Business Writing
Freshman Composition I, University of Illinois and Touro/HTC
*Introduction to Academic Writing (Developmental Composition), University of Illinois
Freshman Composition II, Harper College (6 sections) and Touro/HTC
*Business Composition, University of Illinois (7 sections including one online section),
Touro/HTC, and Blistein
Legal Research and Writing, University of Illinois
Humanities
Introduction to Speech, Touro/HTC
American Government, Blitstein
American History II, Touro/HTC
COURSE AS TEACHING ASSISTANT
British Literature 1798 to the present, University of Illinois [4 sections]
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ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE
Digital Collection Coordinator, Education Justice Project at Danville Correctional Center, 2013-2014
Coordinated NEH-funded computer lab in prison program
Academic Advisor, Engineering Pathways Program, University of Illinois, 2013-2014
Assisted students at four Illinois community colleges in preparing to transfer to the Engineering
College at the University of Illinois
Assistant Director, Programs in Professional Writing, Fall 2009-Fall 2010.
Advised and mentored new professional writing instructors in designing syllabi, creating
assignments, managing the classroom, and assessing student work, and helped direct program
RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
Research Assistant, University of Illinois, Summer 2008 and Fall 2009
Assisted Professor Gillen Wood in research for his book on the Tambora volcanic eruption
Assisted Dr. James Frost in his research on professional communication pedagogy
Research Assistant, Tulane Law School, Spring 2000
Assisted Professor George Strickler in researching Canadian employment discrimination law.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
President, Modern Language Association Graduate Student Caucus, 2012.
Vice-President, Modern Language Association Graduate Student Caucus, 2011.
Editorial Board, Arkansas Literary Review, 2009-2010.
New electronic journal showcasing graduate student research in literary studies
DEPARTMENTAL SERVICE
English Department Rhetoric Advisory Committee, UIUC, 2011-2012.
English Department Curriculum Committee, UIUC, 2010-2011.
English Department Advisory Committee, UIUC, 2009-2010.
English Department Grievance Committee, UIUC, 2008-2009.
Textbook Committee, Programs in Professional Writing, UIUC, 2007.
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REFERENCES
Gillen Wood
Langan Professional Scholar of the Humanities
Professor of English
Director, Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
208 English Building
608 South Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
gdwood@illinois.edu
217-244-1471
Robert Markley
W.D. and S.D. Trowbridge Professor of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
208 English Building
608 South Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
rmarkley@illinois.edu
217-244-6613
Julia Saville
Associate Professor of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
208 English Building
608 South Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
saville@illinois.edu
217-333-0026
Ted Underwood
Professor of English and Information Sciences
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
208 English Building
608 South Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
tunder@illinois.edu
217-244-4617
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Molecular electronics with single molecules in solid-state devices
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Promoter Hypomethylation and Increased Expression of the Long Non-coding RNA LINC00152 Support Colorectal Carcinogenesis
Pathology & Oncology Research, 2020
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