On September 19, 2025, the University of Tampa hosted Georgetown professor Nathan K. Hensley as part of its Utampa Honors Symposium. Hensley’s lecture, “Thought and Art in a Burning World: So What?”, drew upon his freshly published book, Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, to consider what Victorian literature has to teach us in an era when the climate crisis feels not only global, but existential. Hensley drew upon a variety of Victorian texts and artwork, like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, to show how this “action without expectation” works in practice.
Symposium: Thought and Art in a Burning World: So What?
