Environmental Humanities Research Group
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Led by Mellon Faculty Fellow Bob Morrissey, HRI’s Environmental Humanities Research Group pulled the energy of several discipline-centric humanistic and related movements—environmental philosophy, environmental history, ecocriticism, cultural geography, anthropology, and others—into one common conversation about the relationship between humans and non-human nature, past and present.
Intensely interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse, practitioners of the environmental humanities were united by their desire to understand the human place in nature, as well as to examine critically the way people make meaning of it.
Public Programming Highlights
Launched in Fall 2018, the Environmental Humanities research group worked to advance key goals: public programming, interdisciplinary collaboration, individual research, undergraduate research, curriculum, and community-building.
In addition to having weekly research group seminar meetings, a campus Environmental Humanities working group was also formed, which met monthly to strategize with the research group about the environmental humanities on campus, and to dialogue with invited guests.
In the spirit of the environmental humanities’ own commitment to inhabiting a space of both critique and action, their conversations were oriented toward constructive interventions, and they invited speakers who offered perspectives on their own experimental approaches.
2018–2019
- Public lectures by Jenny Price, and Joni Adamson (fall 2018) and Ben Johnson (spring 2019)
- Lowell Duckert and Keith Woodhouse also visited and met with the group and campus stakeholders to discuss environmental humanities research and professional development issues in the field.
- Public screening of the documentary Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock, and director Myron Dewey participated in a Q&A after the screening, as well as met with the research and working groups during his visit
- Field trip to view Alexis Rockman's Great Lakes Cycle art exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center, and to see an installation by Emmanuel Pratt, director of the Sweet Water Foundation at the SMART museum of Art at University of Chicago. The outing included visits to local prairie sites: Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, a prairie reconstruction maintained by the U.S. Forest service at the site of a former WWII arsenal, and Loda Prairie a tiny never-plowed prairie in East Central Illinois.
2019–2020
- Talks from Aaron Sachs (Cornell University) on comedy and climate change and Paul Sutter (University of Colorado, Boulder), on the “ontological turn” in humanistic studies and his work on yellow fever in the Panama Canal
- Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), led a screening of his film, The Land Beneath Our Feet. He led a public discussion of filmmaking as an experimental mode of humanities knowledge production, as well as a creative mode of rethinking corporate and scientific archives “against the grain” for Indigenous history.
- The group hosted Kate Brown (MIT), for a talk on her new book, Manual For Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, an event organized in collaboration with Krannert Art Museum’s “Hot Spots” exhibition.
- 2020 culminated in a March 5–6 symposium, “Experimental Environments,” featuring Max Liboiron, Nick Shapiro, Sarah Kanouse, Sara Pritchard, Sara Grossman, Evan Helper-Smith, Ayala Levin, alongside Fellows Pollyanna Rhee and Leah Aronowsky. Maria Whitehead kicked off the event with a lecture on nature photography, co-organized with the Department of English.
“Flatland: New Directions in Environmental Humanities”
The 2018–2019 Environmental Humanities research group organized their inquiries around the theme “Flatland.” They published a web publication that showcased much of this work, including information about the collaborators and their projects. Visit the publication, “Flatland: New Directions in Environmental Humanities.”
Taking up the prior 2018—19 cohort’s explorations of the theme “flatland,” the 2019–2020 research group styled itself as the “Flatland Lab of the Environmental Humanities” and launched an investigation of “experimental environments,” taking a critical lens to the laboratory model to think about its value for collaborative, interdisciplinary knowledge production in the environmental humanities.
Undergraduate Student Research Symposia
2019
Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium: “Deconstructing and Reshaping Untold Narratives,” organized by the group’s interns, who presented their own research projects and dialogued with other student presenters, as part of Undergraduate Research Week.
publication, 2020
2020
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the interns’ long-planned undergraduate research symposium in spring 2020 was, regrettably, canceled. Instead, they demonstrated great fortitude and improvisational skills, and channeled their energies into a publication titled “Defining Environments: Critical Studies in the Natural World,” which featured their research and five of their slated fellow presenters’ essays.
Undergraduate Coursework
Four courses were offered in the 2019–2020 academic year:
- “Wilderness in America Culture,” and “The Politics of Nature,” were offered in fall 2019, in collaboration with the Campus Honors Program.
- “American Wastelands” was offered in spring 2020, and History 202: “American Environmental History” was adapted for online teaching, with support from the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.
Impact
Environmental Humanities scholars and students continue to pursue research interests at HRI through the Environmental Humanities Research Cluster.
In 2022, Bob Morrissey published People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America (University of Washington Press).