Environmental Humanities Initiative

Curricular Development

Our Mellon-funded project supports new scholarship and the generation of a cluster of courses centered on environmental justice and the literary imagination. We envision a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and fertile field of creativity, discourse, and pedagogy. Each year of the three-year Mellon grant, we are convening a summer incubator for social and environmental justice research and curricular innovation centered on the literary imagination. Cultivating expertise in social and environmental justice in the humanities within a network of leading scholars, the incubator supports participating faculty members through stipends, collegial workshops, and ongoing professional mentorship. A maximum of six new courses each year will jumpstart a robust Environmental Humanities program at Reed and build a sustainable intellectual community for invested faculty.

We are also piloting three new models for interdisciplinary coursework connecting humanistic tools and methods with the work of imagining new possibilities for a better world:

1. An American Environmental Literature course with co-curricular support for community engagement
2. A writing-intensive Environmental Humanities collaboratory centering student inquiry through individual research projects on the environmental imagination and social justice, inspired by the Mellon-funded Humanities Collaboratory at Johns Hopkins
3. A new 200-level, team-taught, Environmental Humanities course to expand and diversify Reed’s celebrated humanities offerings beyond the first-year program.