Approaches to Environmental Humanities Research

This collaborative, interdisciplinary seminar engages modes of inquiry in environmental humanities research and accounts for a range of theories and methods that encompass qualitative, historical, decolonial, and community-engaged scholarships, among others. The seminar focuses in particular on human and nonhuman relations and their impacts on environmental change, drawing on concepts and practices such as survivance, duration, weathering, extraction, and geological time. In addition to scholarly and theoretical texts, we will explore films, novels, creative nonfiction, and performances. Assignments help students engage and refine approaches to environmental scholarly inquiry and practice in a time of intensifying planetary and local crisis.