The European Studies Group will present a virtual guest lecture by Professor Esther Peeren of the University of Amsterdam in a talk entitled "Hinterlands at Sea in Ben Smith's Doggerland" from 1:00-2:00 p.m. on Monday, April 11.  

This event is free and open to the public.

While the rural-urban-riverine-maritime hinterlands of contemporary global capital are as contested as the hinterlands of the heydays of colonialism, instead of as spaces to be developed, they manifest as overdeveloped to the point of being laid waste to. Peeren explores the question of what it means to live in such a hinterland of abandonment by turning to Ben Smith’s 2019 novel Doggerland, set on a wind farm in the North Sea maintained by two men in a dystopian future when the world is run by the Company and all life – including the life of the Company itself – is petering out.

Esther Peeren is professor of cultural analysis at the University Amsterdam and academic director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She directs the ERC-funded research project “Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World” (2018-2023). Recent publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) and the edited volumes Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present (Brill, 2016, with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg), Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave, 2018, with Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet and Thomas Poell) and Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization (Palgrave, 2019, with Simon Ferdinand and Irene Villaescusa-Illán).