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Please join us for the first event in the English and Environmental Humanities spring speaker series! Nathan Hensley (English, Georgetown U) will give a talk on his new book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse (University of Chicago Press, 2025), with a reception to follow.
What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot’s characters in Middlemarch or the doomed lovers of Wuthering Heights, observers of the gathering carbon economy felt themselves ensnared by interlocked and broken systems. In the face of damage so vast and apparently irreversible, what could possibly be done? To answer this question, Hensley shows that nineteenth-century writers and artists devised new ways to understand action—and hope. They rescaled action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. They turned away from logical proofs and direct argumentation and instead called on aesthetic technologies like sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches, and vast, multiplot novels, finding scope for action not at the level of the theme or the thesis but in gestures and details.
Following this lecture, there will be special event for graduate students on Friday, January 30 at 10am: a brunch seminar with Hensley at Oakhurst Inn Café sponsored by the English department. The first 10 students to RSVP to the brunch seminar will receive a free copy of the book. Sign up for the brunch here. Contact Jo Gao (vtn4cz), the graduate coordinator for the brunch, with any questions.
This event is co-sponsored by generous support from the English Department and UVA Environmental Humanities. Contact Adrienne Ghaly (avg4w) or Vicki Olwell (vjo2f) with questions.
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Nathan K. Hensley is Professor of English at Georgetown University. He works on nineteenth-century British literature, environmental humanities, critical theory, and the novel. His other areas of research include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford 2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary representation to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity. His second book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse (Chicago 2025), puts concerns with global justice in dialogue with ecological thinking. Its goal is to show how thinkers from the early phases of our prolonged climate emergency used aesthetic strategies to redefine the category of action. With Philip Steer, he is co-editor of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham 2019). Hensley's writing has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Genre, e-flux journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues.