Professor Jill Didur
Visiting Research Fellow, April-May 2026
Home institution: Concordia University
Jill Didur is Full Professor in the environmental humanities and postcolonial studies in the English Department at Concordia University, Montreal. She is co-editor of (Post)Colonial Ports: Place and NonPlace in the Ecotone (2025 Routledge), Global Ecologies and Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015 Routledge) and author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (2006, University of Toronto Press). She is also Co-Director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster at Concordia’s Milieux Institute for Art, Culture and Technology. Didur’s research interests include the potentiality of language, narrative, aesthetic forms and digital and material culture to redirect the culturally embedded positionality of the human in the current climate crisis. She has a PhD in English from York University, Toronto, and has held visiting research positions as the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India, the University of the Free State, Qwaqwa Campus, South Africa, and Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks.
Project Title: Homo sedimenta: Verticality, Habitability, and the Crawford Lake Case Study
The research I will undertake during this IASH EH Fellowship explores the recent controversy surrounding the Anthropocene Working Group’s July 2023 decision to propose Canada’s Crawford Lake as the Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) candidate site for the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene. Though the recognition of this new geologic epoch was voted down by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) in March 2024, I argue that Earth science research at Crawford Lake (McCarthy 2024) and the concept of ‘deep time’ (Hutton 1788) remain critical for understanding the relation between the global legacy of empire and what Bruno Latour calls “the New Climatic Regime” (2018). While the AWG has been focused on documenting the bomb pulse—the sudden increase of carbon-14 in Earth’s atmosphere caused by hundreds of nuclear bomb tests in the early 1950s—other materials recorded in the varves of the Crawford Lake ‘freeze core’ sample point to centuries of Indigenous (Huron-Wendat) inhabitation and cultivation and the impact of settler colonialism on the land (Labelle 2021). Core samples from Crawford Lake (referred to in Wendat as Kionywarihwae–“where we have a story to tell”) also document corn pollen from the 12th to 15th-century linked to archeological evidence of Iroquois settlements, a drop in tree pollen in the 1800’s from colonial settler logging and agricultural activity, and sediment from George Crawford’s 19th century settler sawmill located at the south end of the lake. My IASH EH Fellowship research will focus on ‘reading’ the specific colonial and material context of the Crawford Lake ‘freeze core’ sample prior to the ‘Nuclear Age’ for multiple and diachronous drivers of climate change, thus “provincializing the Anthropocene” (Morrison 2015)