Zakynthos 2026

Professor Juan Ignacio Oliva
Dept. of English & German Studies, Universidad de La Laguna

Abstract

The study of Borders has undergone a major paradigm shift in recent years, framed within the perception of a new Era, with many possible names: from the Anthropocene at the beginning of the millennium (Crutzen) or the Wasteocene (Armiero) to the more recent Chthulucene (Haraway) and Symbiocene (Albrecht). Ecological New Materialism contributes a new theoretical-critical framework based on the existence of a liquid (post)modernity that affects all social and institutional spheres. Literary and cultural Ecotones are situated within this context, analyzing the different tensions existing between dividing lines from the polysemous perspective of Biology. Essentially, they can be defined as ‘zones of tension between two habitats’ with different, sometimes radically opposing, characteristics, where significant kinetic activity, mutations, and a critical space of great vitality are generated. Ecotones thus serve as multidisciplinary and hybrid spaces of intersection, where pollinating creativity thrives between classes, races, genders, animal and plant species, biota and abiota, and in relation to the territory (loci loquentes and loci agentes). In this lecture, the various possibilities this theory offers will be scrutinized from a material perspective and in connection with new concepts of entanglements between bodies: ‘porous viscosity’ (Tuana), ‘transcorporeality’ (Alaimo), and ‘textural membranes’ as surfaces that act sympoietically or symbiotically between humans and more-than-humans, language and matter, or texts and worlds. Finally, for this analysis, contemporary poems by authors who live in cross-border areas between countries and systems in collision–be they economic, political, or natural–will be used, such as Norma E. Cantú in Texas-Tamaulipas (North America) or Birendra Chattopadhyai in Bengala-Bangla Desh (Southeast Asia), among other showcases.

Biographical note

Juan Ignacio Oliva is full professor of Anglophone Postcolonial Literatures (with an interest in Ecocriticism) at U. La Laguna, Tenerife, Canaries, Spain. He studies humans and their environment in ecopoetry, and the interactive observation of landscape and the relationship of sensitive selves with an agent and eloquent nature. In addition to several co-edited monographs in journals such as ExCentric Narratives (3), or RCEI (64 / 77/ 81/ 82/ 83), he has edited The Painful Chrysalis. Essays on Contemporary Cultural and Literary Identity (Peter Lang, 2011), Realidad y simbología de la montaña [Reality and Symbology of the Mountain] (UAH, 2012) and co-edited Revolving Around India(s): Alternative Images, Emerging Perspectives (CSP, 2019). He is editor-in-chief of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (2014-), and head of the Universidad de La Laguna Centre for Canadian Studies(1997-). Currently, he holds the position of president of the Spanish James Joyce Association (2019-), and vice president of SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies, 2023-). He was also president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE, in the period 2014-2016) and of the Spanish Association for Interdisciplinary India Studies (AEEII, 2014-2019). He is a member of the research groups GIECO-Franklin-UAH (Ecocriticism) and Ratnakara-UdL (Indian Ocean Literatures).

Associate Professor Christos Karydis
Department of Environment, Ionian University

Abstract

The accelerating environmental crisis—manifested through climate change, extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and human-induced degradation—poses unprecedented threats to cultural heritage worldwide. Among the most vulnerable are sacred natural and monastic landscapes UNESCO monuments, such as the Holy Mountain of Athos, Mount of Sinai, the monastery of St. John on Patmos, etc. where cultural, spiritual and ecological values are deeply intertwined. This presentation examines the role of preventive conservation as a strategic framework for safeguarding such sites in an era of environmental uncertainty. Preventive conservation moves beyond interventive conservation by emphasizing risk assessment, environmental monitoring, sustainable site management, disaster planning and community engagement. In the context of remote monastic enclaves and pilgrimage landscapes, it also requires integrating traditional knowledge, spiritual stewardship practices and contemporary scientific methods. Through selected case studies, this presentation explores how preventive conservation can mitigate climate-related risks—including wildfires, floods, corrosion, bio-deterioration, unstable environmental parameters i.e temperatures and humidity, indoor and outdoor pollution, etc. while preserving the intangible heritage, living traditions and ecological balance that define these sacred places. By positioning preventive conservation as a ‘central idea’ and both as technical and ethical responsibility, the presentation argues for a holistic, interdisciplinary approach that bridges heritage science, environmental policy, theology and local governance. Ultimately, safeguarding UNESCO monuments such as Athos, Sinai and Patmos is not only a matter of protecting architectural fabric, but of sustaining cultural identity, spiritual continuity and collective memory in a time of global environmental transformation.

Biographical note

Associate professor Christos Karydis is the Head of the Department of Environment at the Ionian University; Founder and Director of the MSc “Preservation & Management of Cultural Heritage” at the Ionian University; Director of the ‘PreServe” Lab; and Director of the School of Iconography “Fotis Kontoglou.” He is also teaching several postgraduate courses mainly at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and at the University of the Aegean. He is the academic responsible and co-author for four (4) e-learning programs at the University of Athens. He has been working in Churches and monasteries at Mount Athos, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Colombia, Belgium, Eritrea, Ghana, Malaysia, Spain, Iraq, UK and Greece since 2002. He is an external adviser in monasteries at Mount Athos and head conservator of the textile collection of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul. Prof. Karydis’s area of expertise is preventive conservation of organic materials. Additionally, he has published four (4) monographs and more than 100 papers in scientific journals, international and national conferences. He is the author of the first book on preventive conservation of textiles written in Greek (2006) and he is the co-editor and author of the Science in Preventive Conservation: Preservation & Management of Collections (2013). He is also the editor and author of the catalogue The Late Antiquity Textile Collection of the Holy Basilic, Patriarch and Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Theologian in Patmos: Documentation, Scientific Analysis and Preservation (2025). He has established and organized more than four (4) full conservation labs in Greece, Istanbul, Jerusalem and Mount Athos.

Professor Alexandra Ganser
University of Vienna

Abstract

“The Moon belongs to everyone / Best things in life they’re free / Stars belong to everyone / They cling there for you and for me,” Sam Cooke crooned in 1964, echoing both the romantic tradition of stargazing and the idea of the sky and its celestial bodies as a commons beyond economic structures of ownership and profit. While the decades of the first Space Age epitomized a mostly symbolic appropriation of outer space in the Cold War context, today’s “Second Space Age” is quite literally changing the materialities of the cosmos and its international laws. My lecture starts by drawing out the similarities (and a few differences) between conceptualizing the world oceans during the first era of globalization in early modernity and outer space today, critiquing technocratic and utilitarian conceptions of both the world oceans and what seems to be imagined not as a “final,” but rather as an infinite frontier from a globally circulating US-American perspective. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss a number of counter-imaginaries to the dominant discourse of frontierism by turning to Afrofuturist examples as well as to Indigenous voices that question settler colonial conceptualizations of an astropelago – a sea of stars – and present critical correctives to hegemonic outer space narratives. From Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (1970) and “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project” (2024) to Indigenous astronomy and star stories, these perspectives parallel ethnically different oceanic epistemologies such as Paul Gilroy’s 1993 concept of the Black Atlantic. Alongside these voices and with critics like Gayatri Spivak and Bruno Latour, I will argue for a new logic of planetarity that is both down to earth and up in the air.

Biographical note

Alexandra Ganser holds the chair in North American Studies (literatures and cultures) at the University of Vienna, Austria, where she also headed the interdisciplinary research platform and PhD program “Mobile Cultures and Societies: Interdisciplinary Studies on Transnational Formations” (2015-2024). She co-directs the Centre for Canadian Studies (ZKS) and is co-editor of the book series “Maritime Literature and Culture” with Meg Samuelson and Charne Lavery (Palgrave Macmillan). A Fulbright alumna and board member as well as former Daniel Christoph Ebeling fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, her research interests currently focus on American astroculture and on oceanic refugee mobilities in North American literatures. Her book publications include the monographs Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy, 1678–1865 (2020) and Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (2009) as well as a number of edited volumes and special issues, among them Mobile Kulturen und Gesellschaften / Mobile Cultures and Societies, ed. with Annegret Pelz (2020); Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in American Culture and Beyond, ed. with Katharina Gerund and Heike Paul (2012), as well as a forthcoming special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies on American astroculture (co-edited with Jens Temmen).