Topics in the Blue Humanities: Perceptions and Representations of Slime

讲座专家：Simon C. Estok

讲座时间：2025年6月16日 9：30-11：00

讲座地点：综合楼354

主讲人简介:

Dr. Simon C. Estok is a professor and Senior Fellow of South Korea’s oldest university, Sungkyunkwan University (成均館大學校, established 1398). He is editor of the A&HCI-listed journal Neohelicon: Acta comparationis litterarum universarum and is an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Art. Estok held China’s prestigious East Scholar Award (东方学者) from 2015 to 2018, has received the National Research Foundation of Korea Writing in the Humanities Program book award twice, and is best known for his theory of ecophobia, which has been profoundly influential, spawning an entirely new discipline—ecogothic studies—and several new journals. Estok began formulating the term “ecophobia” in his doctoral thesis, introduced the term to the ecocritical community in 2009, and then published his masterful book The Ecophobia Hypothesis through Routledge in 2018. Estok is not only an influential ecocritic but a pioneering Shakespearean. He was the first person to study “ecocritical Shakespeares,” against considerable resistance—now it is a thriving industry all its own. His work is wide-ranging. He has over a hundred articles published, 70 in A&HCI journals (including PMLA), 26 book chapters, and 9 books, notably Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (2011), East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (2013), and The Ecophobia Hypothesis (2018). His most recent book is entitled Slime: An Elemental Imaginary, published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a book entitled The Agony of Water in an Age of Climate Change, contracted as the inaugural book in the Bloomsbury Blue Humanities series and forthcoming in March 2026.

内容简介：

Slime is on the rise in an age of climate change. Slime stirs the imagination and evokes strong responses. Slime is central to life and growth, and it heals.  Slime is also central to death, degeneration, and rot, and it infects and kills. Slime titillates and terrifies, is a toy for children, a spot of disgust and horror at the back of the fridge, and a welcome lubricant during sexual congress. Slime is horror and drips from the mouths of aliens and monsters. Slime is one of the least theorized and yet most fundamental elements of our lives and deaths, and engaging with it is becoming more urgent because of its proliferation both in the seas (more jellyfish as food chains collapse) and in our imaginations (more slimy zombies in our fictions as our social and political structures wobble). Ameliorating climate change or healing its effects seems very unlikely at this point, but one thing is certain: if we stand any chance of productively addressing growing climate issues and honestly confronting matters associated with them, then theorizing and thus understanding how people have thought and continue to think about slime is absolutely necessary.