DelawareScene: An Evening with Dr. Lowell Duckert @ Huxley & Hiro Booksellers

An Evening with Dr. Lowell Duckert

Huxley & Hiro is thrilled to host Dr. Lowell Duckert, Associate Professor of English at The University of Delaware, for a conversation about his latest scholarly publication, Arcticologies. Moderated by Maire Wilson, it promises to be an evening of chilly insights and freezing inspiration!

Book Description:

Do we really know what cold is? In Arcticologies, Lowell Duckert delves into early modern European texts to trace how representations of frigidity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have contributed to historical understandings of climate and contemporary debates on climate change. Arguing that human culture and science are, in fact, indebted to the cold, Duckert suggests that these early depictions offer critical terms for advancing the aims of climate-change activism and assisting in counterapocalyptic thinking.

An imaginative and intellectual journey, Arcticologies reveals the enduring role of cold in wide-ranging storytelling traditions. It draws on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello and the works of Thomas Dekker, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes and is informed throughout by contemporary Indigenous writing, including that of Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. In reflecting on these assorted accounts, Duckert sees cold as not only an environmental hardship but a source of cultural creativity and resilience, highlighting moments of collaboration between humans and the icy world, from arctic exploration to urban fairs on frozen rivers.

Cold, Duckert makes clear, is more than the absence of warmth. Situating our contemporary obsession with impending planetary meltdown within the mazelike arcticologies of the past, Duckert shows how early modern cold brought about forms of curiosity, vocabulary, and interspecies relationality that can serve us today. In doing so, he asks us to identify what has been lost and who is at risk in today’s thinning cold—while also urging us to imagine alternative futures focused not on inevitable and total collapse but on adaptation and preserving what remains.

About the Author:

Lowell Duckert received his B.A. from Western Washington University (2004), his M.A. from Arizona State University (2007), and his Ph.D. from The George Washington University (2012). He specializes in early modern drama and travel literature, environmental criticism, new materialism (especially actor-network theory), and water studies. He has published on various topics such as glaciers, polar bears, the color maroon, rain, fleece, mountaintop removal mining, and lagoons. In general, his work attempts to reshape present-day relations between humans and nonhumans by plumbing premodern wet worlds.

About the Moderator:

Maire Wilson is a recent graduate of New York University's Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (XE) Master's program. Her most recent scholarship utilizes an eco-critical lens to analyze monstrosity in contemporary speculative fiction.

Looking to pick up Lowell's book? Stop by our Wilmington, Delaware store, or support us online by ordering through Bookshop.org or Libro.fm. Just be sure to select Huxley & Hiro as your bookstore!