One-Day Symposium: Before Earthrise: Global Imagining in Literature and Visual Culture, 1550-1968
Registration closes 31 May
In a time of planetary crisis, our understanding of the earth as a whole is a matter of ecological and geopolitical consequence. What extinguished worldviews might be salvaged from the past, and (how) can these historical imaginings invigorate new ways of thinking the global?

This one-day interdisciplinary symposium will explore the theme of global imagining in literature and visual culture of the “modern age,” from the Copernican revolution up to the “earthrise” photographs of the 1960s, which captured a view of the earth from outer space for the first time. Taking as its focal point the idea and image of the terrestrial globe, the conference aims to investigate how and why artists, writers, and other thinkers imagined the earth as a whole before the age of space travel and neoliberal globalisation. We will look to past literary and artistic methods of imagining, representing, and (re)configuring the terrestrial globe across multiple chronological and cultural contexts, shedding new light on the ideological and philosophical stakes of global imagining and reassessing contemporary conceptions of the global.
Date: 24 June 2025, 9:00
Venue: English Faculty, Oxford
Speaker: Keynote speaker: Professor Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale)
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Organiser: Dr Caroline Anjali Ritchie (Exeter College, Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: caroline.ritchie@exeter.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/conferences-and-events/english-faculty/events/before-earthrise-global-imagining-in-literature-and-visual-culture-1550-1968
Cost: Standard: £18 / Student: £8 (includes tea/coffee, lunch, and wine)
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Belinda Clark