Environmental Humanities

Faculty across HFA are addressing the climate emergency through interdisciplinary work that contemplates the past, present, and future of environmental change. Studies in this realm include a wide range of topics and organize synergies forward in the college. 

• Anthropocene Lab: The interdisciplinary “Thinking the Earth” Seminars of the Anthropocene Lab, co-led by Malcolm Sen in the English Department, gathers scholars and artists to pilot a survey of critical literature on the Anthropocene. 
• Architecture Research Collaborative: The Department of Architecture’s recently launched Architecture Research Collaborative develops research projects at the Intersections of Environmental Humanities and the built environment.
• Art Sustainability Activism: Through Art Sustainability Activism, the UMass Fine Arts Center, the MFA for Poets and Writers, and the School of Earth & Sustainability, are working to create deliberate opportunities to connect artists, scientists, and changemakers. Together, the group reckons with climate change, elevating awareness, recognizing climate grief, and catalyzing meaningful change through events, panels, lectures, and even a literary magazine called Paperbark.
• Climates of Inequality: Through Climates of Inequality, UMass Public Historians, as members of the national collaborative The Humanities Action Lab, worked with community groups in nearby Springfield to explore how environmental hazards from Interstate 91, the Connecticut River, and years of heavy industry have affected health and education in the North End, a primarily Latinx neighborhood. 
• Environmental Humanities Program: Environmental Humanities scholarship responds to the long history of environmental exploitation of colonized peoples, and the economic, ecological, racial, and gendered dimensions of such exploitation. It is interested in understanding current resource wars, food shortages, the rise of epidemics, the importance of multispecies imaginaries, and the place of nation-state politics at a time of climate breakdown. It argues that to better understand and respond to the climate crisis, both scientific and humanities perspectives are equally crucial.  
• Renaissance of the Earth: The Renissance of the Earth revolutionizes what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Through a range of cross-disciplinary collaborative models, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research mandate with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life.
• Sustainable EweMass: The innovative Sustainable EweMass project–co-led by art historian Meg Vickery considers how grazing Lawnscape management—yes, sheep on campus!—might advance sustainability aims and address historical and modern inequities to pastoral landscapes. 

Related Certificates

• Cornerstone Scholars Certificate