In this talk, Nathan K. Hensley draws on his recent book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (Chicago, 2025) to propose three categories for making change when altering the course of events feels impossible. Reflecting on familiar tropes of climate-action discourse, Hensley draws attention to more muted forms of elaboration: categories of social possibility that open space for transformation inside of systems from which no full escape is on offer, and no ending in sight. The talk focuses on paintings of an extraction-scarred Jamaica, c 1815, by itererant watercolorist William Berryman and tiny verse fragments by Emily Brontë, c. 1840. Reading them, Hensley shows how these and other nineteenth-century aesthetic objects construed revolution in a minor key, rescaling action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. Barely legible by human eyes and perfectly invisible to AI modeling systems and regimes of digital optimization, the glitches and wobbles of these gestural notations carve space for change in nontotal and only semi-articulate ways. Focusing on such tiny disruptions helps Hensley demonstrate how close attention to Victorian literature can recover a prehistory for the deeply-felt sense of powerlessness many of us know all too well today. He goes further to recast abolition for an age of non-transcendence--an incomplete freedom visible mostly in small movements of hand and mind together, always unfinished. The results help underscore the vital role of humanistic work in a moment of chaotic political and geophysical change.

This is the first talk in the 2-part Victorian Culture and Climate Change lecture series. The second event will be delivered by Stephanie O'Rourke (Art History, University of St Andrews) on September 30. 

Nathan K. Hensley is Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford, 2016, paperback 2018), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity. His second book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (Chicago, 2025), shows how certain nineteenth century thinkers came to terms with failing systems, as they turned away from fantasies of total completion and revolutionary overturning and toward collaboration and solidarity—making concrete changes to the world in small but real ways. Hensley’s essays have appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Genre, e-flux journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. In 2018 he was awarded the Richard Stein Essay Prize by the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Association (INCS).

Collaboration is central to Hensley’s work as both theme and practice. With Philip Steer, he is coeditor of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham 2019) and, with Devin Garofalo, The Barbara Johnson Collective (Northwestern UP, forthcoming November 2026). Other coedited work includes a cluster on the Modernism/Modernity‘s Print + platform called “Scale and Form; or what was Global Modernism” (2018), coedited with Thomas S. Davis; and a 2020 Victorian Literature and Culture special issue coedited with Molly Clark Hillard on “Commitment,” among other projects. In 2013 Hensley served on the jury for the Caine Prize in African Writing and in 2015 convened the Lannan Symposium, “In Nature’s Wake: The Art and Politics of Environmental Crisis.” With Dana Luciano and John McNeill, he co-directed the 2016-2018 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar, “Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change” at Georgetown. With Patrick O’Malley, he co-organized the 2025 NAVSA conference in Washington DC, “Aftermaths.”

Hensley holds degrees from Vassar College (B.A.), the University of Notre Dame (M.A.), and Duke (Ph.D), where he was also a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. Before coming to D.C., he was assistant professor of English at Macalester College. In 2020 Hensley received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching awarded by Georgetown College, and currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in English at Georgetown. He was born in Fresno, California, and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.