coming after

Ecopoetics in Late Antiquity and Beyond

Welcome to Coming After: Ecopoetics in Late Antiquity and Beyond. This project, based at Ghent University, brings contemporary ecocriticism into dialogue with late antiquity, with a broad and inclusive scope.

Late antique and other premodern literature is rich with more-than-human worlds and entanglements: riverscapes, deserts, oceans, long journeys, storms, droughts, ruins, churches, cities, animals, saints, songs. Ecocriticism – along with related approaches such as posthumanism, material ecocriticism, and thing studies – can thus open up new understandings of the strange and vibrant poetics of late antique literature and art. In turn, the untimeliness and strangeness of late antiquity and premodernity can be applied to our understanding of ecocriticism itself. What is “late antique” about contemporary ecocritical thinking? How does the sense of belatedness, of coming after the end, shape today’s ecocritical conversations?

We invite anyone working at the crossroads of ecocriticism and late antiquity (both broadly defined) to enter an open-ended and curious conversation about ecocriticism, the ‘late antique’, and the sense of coming after.

join the conversation…

  • Interview: Paola Moretti and Alessia Prontera

    New readings of late antique creation narratives “reveal unexpectedly ‘ecological’ – i.e., compassionate and relational – views of the natural world.” In this interview, we discuss late antiquity and ecocriticism with Paola F. Moretti (Milan) and Alessia Prontera (Venice-L’Aquila), who are members of the research team working on the project HUMAN (= HUMAns in Nature.…

  • Interview: Simon Goldhill and Chiara Thumiger

    Simon Goldhill and Chiara Thumiger discuss their recent work on (late) antiquity and environmental thinking, covering the importance of environmental thinking in the study of ancient medicine, and the impact that late antique Christianity has had on human conceptions of nature.

  • Late Ancient Latin and Ecocriticism at Milan and L’Aquila

    We are excited to introduce a new project on ecocritical approaches to late antiquity, currently underway at the University of Milan and the University of l’Aquila: HUMAN. “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen”. It is a famous statement of Lynn White according to which Christianity is often accused of being responsible…

  • Interview: Jason König

    “We need to be much bolder in the way we use the past for our own purposes in the present.” Jason König shares his thoughts mountains, ecocriticism, and (late) antiquity. König is professor in Greek at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and…

  • Interview: Glenn Peers

    Glenn Peers thinks with parrots in his discussion of a fifth-century Syriac sermon by Isaac of Antioch. Glenn Peers is Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies at Williams College in the spring of 2024. He formerly taught in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, and in the Department of…

  • Late Latin Ecopoetics at Ghent University

    Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin literature at Ghent University, and has been teaching an MA course specifically on ecocritical approaches to late Latin literature. Late Latin Ecopoetics: journey, displacement, interruption. In this course we explore a number of late Latin poetic texts, written between the late 4th and 6th centuries, through an ecocritical lens. Our corpus…