Empire and Ecologies utilises a humanities-centred and multidisciplinary approach to methodological issues and case studies, examining the construction of nature by various forms of imperial power across a range of periods — from the imperialism of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, to forms of ‘new imperialism’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — and across a range of locations — from colonies and metropoles of Anglophone empire to Hispanophone and Russian/Soviet contexts of empire.

To investigate these questions, the symposium brought together different disciplinary perspectives — such as literary and cultural scholarship, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, transnational studies, critical Indigenous studies, creative praxis, and the history of colonial commodities and natural resources.