05/05 The Screams of the Glacier: Witnessing Climate and Apparitions in the Arctic and Antarctic with Lisa E. Bloom and Andoni Alonso

Due to health reasons affecting the speaker, Lisa E. Bloom, the event scheduled for 5 May has been cancelled. We will announce a new date for the seminar shortly.

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We are delighted to announce that on May 5th, we will have the pleasure of listening to Lisa E. Bloom and Andoni Alonso in conversation at a conference about The Screams of the Glacier: Witnessing Climate and Apparitions in the Arctic and Antarctic, an article in which she proposes the concept of Arctic Gothic as a way of describing emerging aesthetic responses to climate change, focusing on grief, the spectral, and ecological collapse.

Through an analysis of Joyce Campbell’s Ice Ghoul, Dianne Chisholm’s The Waking Glacier, and Ohan Breiding’s Belly of a Glacier, she examines how these works challenge heroic, masculinist, and extractivist imaginaries, offering instead visual and narrative modes of mourning, care, and embodied witness. Rather than representing glaciers as sublime or static entities, they present them as sentient, dying bodies, laden with memory and warnings about spectral futures. From the perspective of feminist environmental theory, Arctic Gothic is presented not only as a genre, but as a necessity for cultural transformation in the way we perceive and address the climate crisis.

Biography:

Lisa E. Bloom is the author of many books and articles in art history, visual culture, and cultural studies including Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press) Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity(Routledge, London), and more recently, Climate Change, and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic (Duke University Press). She has taught and has been a researcher at numerous universities and art schools over the years including the University of California, Berkeley where she was a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies from 2018-2024. For more on her work see her website:  www.lisaebloom.com