Dear colleagues,
To mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the University of Notre Dame and the Keats-Shelley Association of America invite you to
The Last Man at 200: Imagining the Future after Environmental Disaster.
Please join us September 24-25, 2026, for a conference on Shelley’s novel and the environmental humanities, with a keynote lecture by Susan Wolfson, and variety of related programming, including the launch of Eileen Hunt’s dual bicentennial edition of The Last Man and The Journal of Sorrow (Oxford World’s Classics, 2026); a fireside chat with novelist Emily St. John Mandel addressing the Shelleyan resonances of her novel Station Eleven; a reading by Rachel Feder from her new adaptation of The Last Man; and Omar Miranda’s preview of his second edition of an abridged Last Man for Romantic Circles.
This two-day event serves as the 2026 Niemeyer Lecture in Political Philosophy, the Henkels Lecture in the Liberal Arts, and the 2026 K-SAA Curran Symposium. It will produce a book under contract with Bloomsbury’s Nineteenth-Century Contexts series featuring the contributions of all speakers and an interview with Emily St. John Mandel, edited by Eileen Hunt.
The conference on September 25 will take place in person and via Zoom; the fireside chat and associated events on September 24 are offered in person only.
For more details and to register, please visit: https://web.cvent.com/event/a6f5cf68-666e-4c99-a241-4253745dacec/summary
Eileen Hunt