World-Making seeks to spark a conversation about the many ways in which early modern literature imagines, revises, and attempts to control the dimensions of the world. It asks how conceptions of the planet (whether physical, geopolitical, cultural, or climatological) shaped political participation; how early modernity modulated between local structures and global frameworks; and how various textual and literary forms sought to represent the world: even, at times, interrogating anthropocentric perspectives. This one-day conference brings together a diverse group of scholars drawing on comparative literary and cultural studies, ecocriticism, queer theory, and critical race studies, among other approaches, to ask how literature can help us reimagine our participation in the shared conditions of daily life on Earth. Organized by Timothy Lundy, Liza McIntosh, and Bernadette Myers, doctoral candidates from the Columbia Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
