This course engages with trailblazing feminist texts in utopian literature, science fiction, fantasy and the Gothic to see how they helped shape the history of science by exploring alternative forms of knowledge and cognition. Additionally, a key historical or philosophical text will aid our investigation into the functioning and significance of each speculative thought experiment.

This course introduces crucial ‘climate imaginaries’ of the 20th and 21st centuries and the critical role they can play. We will focus in particular on science-fictionality, the connection to general science and technology research as well as contemporary climate science, and texts from marginalised perspectives, including feminist and postcolonial approaches.

This course explores responses to the changing environment from the Romantic age to the present day as expressed in the utopian and dystopian imagination. It will trace u/dystopian thought and action across literature, political/scientific theory and social organization, investigating its ability to both illustrate contemporary ecological attitudes in enlightening ways and catalyse genuine change.

This course introduces the 19th cent. Gothic unconventionally, as speculative proto-climate fiction. Tracing patterns of socio-/ecological repression, we will examine the climatological sublime in key texts and in their technologies of production to develop a deeper understanding of early attitudes towards environmental collapse, potentially generating vital insights for climate research today.

This course engages with climate fiction by female authors via the interrelations between climate, science and fiction. Climate science has shaped our ‘climate imaginaries’ from the early 19th century to the present day, particularly through a domineering ‘masculinist’ lens, but we are focused on interesting female-authored alternatives in climate science-inspired narratives.