“Nothing alive but us and the plant”: Eco-Horror and Scott Smith’s The Ruins

Event Details

Plants and vegetal life have long been positioned as antagonistic to humans in popular literature and film. Join Indiana University Kokomo Professor James Coby as he delves into the ways that authors have constructed confrontations between humankind and the environment as a means of grappling with climate change, the Anthropocene, and legacies of colonialism using Scott Smith’s horror novel The Ruins as an example.

A native of Guntersville, AL, James Coby moved to Indiana in the spring of 2020 to begin teaching at Indiana University Kokomo. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and his research primarily revolves around literature of the American South, environmental literature, comics and graphic novels, and American realism. His scholarship and reviews have been published in numerous popular and academic forums, and he is currently coediting a collection of essays, BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence!, for the University Press of Mississippi. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, running, baking, and exploring this state.

This event was made possible by a grant from Indiana Humanities.