Huntington U: Climate Fiction

According to European climate scientists, July 21, 2024, was the hottest day ever recorded on
Earth—until the record was broken again the very next day. Climate change has thus become
palpable to even the most privileged amongst us, though its effects have proved particularly
devastating to vulnerable communities across the globe. Meanwhile, although scientific reports
and models provide crucial information about the climate crisis, various humanistic artforms
have taken up the mantle as well.

Key details:

Across six sessions of this “Huntington U” course, participants will consider:

• What are the challenges and strategies of representing climate change in artforms such as literature, painting, photography, and film and television?
• How have structures like settler colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism intersected with climate change?
• Whose climate stories are being represented, and how?

Sessions will include a tour of the upcoming Huntington exhibition Storm Cloud: Picturing the
Origins of Our Climate Crisis and a tour of the surrounding gardens.

View/download the course syllabus

About the Instructor:
Nicole Seymour is a professor of English and a graduate adviser for environmental studies at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of several books, including Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Glitter (Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, 2022). She has held fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and she was a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellow at The Huntington in summer 2024.

For questions about this course, please contact Joy Yamahata via email or by phone at 626-405-3457.