Environmental Humanities

About Environmental Humanities

The Environmental Humanities emerged partly as a critique of how modernity organized knowledge — separating the sciences from the humanities, the social from the ecological. It thus operates at the level of epistemology, asking how we know as much as what we know, and questioning the colonial origins of such epistemological practices. This is why, some of the earliest anti-colonial intellectuals, such as Frantz Fanon, were already speaking in environmental terms, well before climate change and the Anthropocene came to be the intellectual and moral clarion calls that they are today. Questions of environmental harm, disposability of cultures, eradication of ways of life, and silencing ways of knowing, through exploitation and extraction were first and foremost anti-colonial in origin.

In the context of the Department of English, the Environmental Humanities offers exhilarating possibilities of literary critique. Can literary texts be read as documents of ecological imperialism, environmental history, or environmental philosophies? Can poetry be read as survivable tools to address widescale scarcity and crisis? What are the connective threads between postcolonial literatures and environmental literatures? Can they be segregated as such? Where do concerns of feminist, queer, and trans theories intersect with environmental ones?

The Environmental Humanities Specialization offers us a solid grounding in climate change discourse and broader environmental questions. It opens pathways to think with texts as we navigate concerns surrounding contemporary ecological crises.

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Requirements (3 courses)

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Students must complete at least 3 of these courses: 

1. ENG 190N Environment, Climate Change, and the Humanities (Gen Ed course, taught in Spring semesters)
2. ENG 200 Intensive Literary Studies (Check for EH designation)
3. ENG 205 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies
4. ENG 300 (Check for EH designation)
5. ENG 362 
6. ENG 365 The Literature of Ireland: Nature and Culture
7. ENG 372 Caribbean Literature: The Sea is History
8. ENG 492N and 492N (H): Nature, Climate Change and Literature (Capstone Course, taught in Fall semesters)
9. ENG 494SI: Literature and Social / Environmental Justice

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