THE LAST MAN AT 200–Imagining the Future after Environmental Disaster 

Post-Apocalyptic Political Thought from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014)

The 2026 Niemeyer Lectures in Political Philosophy, Henkels Lectures in the Liberal Arts, and the 2026 K-SAA Curran Symposium

We are looking forward to our next Curran Symposium on the topic of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). The event will take place on September 24th and 25th 2026 at the University of Notre Dame, and will be hosted by Eileen M. Hunt, Professor of Political Science, and Yasmin Solomonescu, Associate Professor of English. It will serve as a joint event: the 2026 Niemeyer Lectures in Political Philosophy, the Henkels Lectures in the Liberal Arts, and the 2026 K-SAA Curran Symposium.

This two-day celebration and conference will produce a book under contract with Bloomsbury's Nineteenth-Century Contexts series, featuring the contributions of all speakers including an interview with Emily St. John Mandel, and edited by Eileen Hunt.

Details for registering for the free and public conference will be posted online later this summer. Some events will be available by Zoom.

The Last Man at 200–Imagining the Future After Environmental Disaster

Principal Investigators: Eileen Hunt, Professor in the Department of Political Science, Roy Scranton, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of Notre Dame’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, Ricky Herbst, Cinema Program Director at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center and Term Teaching Professor of Film in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, and Yasmin Solomonescu, Associate Professor in the Department of English.

Arts Initiative Research Theme: Techne Futures

Marking the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), this project brings together faculty and students from Notre Dame and universities around the world to explore the enduring legacies of Shelley’s text by showing its artistic and philosophical resonances with one of the most important works of environmental and disaster literature of this century, Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). The award-winning novel inspired the HBO series of the same name in 2021, and The Last Man at 200 will bring Mandel to Notre Dame during a globally broadcast conference in fall 2026. The conference convening will also support Eileen Hunt’s forthcoming edited publication, the first book devoted to Mary Shelley’s genre-defining post-apocalyptic pandemic novel and its legacies.