Correcting the Climate: Jules Verne’s Planetary Apocalypse

Thursday 5 March 2026, 12 midday - 1.30pm

Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

All welcome

Correcting the Climate: Jules Verne’s Planetary Apocalypse

Dr Sebastian Egholm Lund (English JRF Linacre College, Oxford)

Dr Sebastian Lund will be presenting a book chapter from his upcoming monograph on Climate Control and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle. The book argues that a range of canonical fin de siècle-authors such as Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Mark Twain gave aesthetic form to the idea that humanity could affect global climate change. Paradoxically, they did this not through the scientific paradigm of global warming, but its perverse inverse: climate control. The book provides thus a literary history of anthropogenic climate.

The chapter will be discussed by DPhil candidate Claire Qu (English, Oxford).

Dr Sebastian Egholm Lund is a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College Oxford. His work focuses on nineteenth-century ecology, literature and science. His current project, Empire of the Sun: Imagining Solar Energy in Colonial India, 1878-1915, examines how British engineers, literary authors, and the greater English-language newspapers from colonial India imagined solar energy as an imperial infrastructure. Proposing the term “solar imperialism” to describe this understudied geopolitical doctrine, the project aims to provide an imperial history of the current energy transition.