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This autumn, the Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities (OCEH) was delighted to welcome Stefano Rozzoni as our first visiting researcher of the semester. Stefano is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bergamo, whose research explores environmental narratives in Anglophone literature and culture across different historical periods, media, and aesthetic forms. His work brings together literature, philosophy, and cultural analysis to rethink how humans relate to nonhuman worlds - a conversation that feels increasingly urgent today.
During his time at OCEH, Stefano became an active and inspiring presence in our community. He contributed to discussions across disciplinary boundaries, developed new research ideas, and also organized a participatory workshop exploring AI-generated poetry based on air pollution data. The workshop, Pollution-Generated Poetry: A Prototype Across AI, Literature, and the Environment, invited participants to consider how creative tools might foster new forms of environmental awareness.
Below, Stefano reflects on his background, his time with us in Oslo, and the research threads he continues to develop.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your interest in the environmental humanities.
I am a very social person who loves the buzz of big cities, but I also enjoy long, silent walks in natural environment. I am passionate about essayistic writing, as well as engaging in critical inquiry into today’s pressing issues. I am also a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in literary and cultural studies at the University of Bergamo, Italy, where I focus on anglophone literature, primarily exploring alternative models of human–nonhuman ethical relations in response to contemporary crises, as well as the role of narratives in shaping their realization.
Since I began exploring the environmental humanities during my PhD, I have found a strong sense of purpose in this field for its capacity to grasp the complexity of our present time, to show how environmental, social, political, economic (and many other…) crises converge, and to reveal how this convergence compels us to rethink what it means to be human – both in relation to ourselves as individuals and as a species, and to the world around us. The interdisciplinary dialogue that defines the environmental humanities is a great source of inspiration for me, both as an intellectual practice of continual learning and connecting across different forms of knowledge, and as an ethical one: an effort to adopt the perspectives of others and to recognize the necessary coexistence of diverse viewpoints oriented toward practical action – something I believe our world urgently needs today.
What has your time at OCEH been like?
I have been following the activities in the field of the environmental humanities at UiO for several years with great interest. Even from a distance – e.g. by reading event abstracts and keeping track of initiatives organized – I discovered the work of many scholars, new approaches and perspectives. I sensed the presence of a genuine spirit of ‘thinking outside the box,’ marked by originality, creativity, and intellectual vibrancy – all qualities I could experience firsthand during my two wonderful months as a visiting researcher at OCEH.
I am happy to share that at OCEH I found a very welcoming environment, full of initiatives fostering innovation and encouraging diverse (and alternative!) ways of thinking, while maintaining intellectual rigor and a remarkable capacity for transdisciplinary exchange. The talks and workshops I attended offered real meaningful dialogues and contributed to building up a strong sense of community. I am grateful for the support and generosity of the OCEH team, within which ideas are not only welcomed, but also actively discussed and implemented.
I also greatly benefited from the extended network gravitating around the center. For me, engaging with scholars across disciplines, sharing a common vocabulary while bringing diverse perspectives, captures the essence of belonging to an international academic community, especially one committed to addressing today’s urgent challenges with seriousness and Vision.
What have you been working on while you were here?
At OCEH I found the ideal environment for finalizing my monograph on the Sustainable Pastoral, while also moving on with project ideas I had set aside for some time and wished to pursue in the right context. It is very inspiring to work in a setting that offers a well-balanced combination of quiet, focused time for individual research and stimulating participatory activities.
During my stay, I also had the chance to plan a workshop on a prototype of AI-generated poetry I had been co-developing in recent months, integrating air pollution data, literary texts on the subject, and existing AI poetry systems. The goal of my workshop is to test the prototype software through a participatory activity and gather feedback, exploring how such tools might be used in educational settings to foster affective engagement with issues that are often overlooked or invisible (such as air pollution, which in my own region, the Po Valley in northern Italy, remains a particularly urgent concern).
The wave of inspiration I experienced at OCEH also enabled me to preliminary draft two papers: one on new materialism and Romanticism in John Keats’s poetry, and another on posthumanist applied art and labyrinths. These were projects I had been reflecting on for some time with some colleagues but had struggled to move forward. I owe this progress to the inspiring conversations and exchanges I enjoyed at OCEH, and to the support I received from the network! I look forward with great enthusiasm to continuing collaborations with OCEH in the months…and years to come!
We thank Stefano for his generous presence, thoughtful contributions, and inspiring work, and we look forward to future collaborations.