Environmental Humanities Initiative

Fables of Warning: Rachel Carson’s Ecological Imagination
“We don’t usually think of The New Yorker as changing the world,” the biologist and science writer Rachel Carson’s editor told her when she first pitched an exposé of DDT and other chemical pesticides in 1958, “but this one time it might.” Published four years later as a book, Silent Spring (1962) became a bestseller, widely credited with launching the environmental movement by explaining the biological consequences of unchecked greed and unregulated industry. Yet Carson did more than inform her readers; a former English major, she used the power of the literary imagination to convey the complexity of ecological relationships, speculate about the risks of inaction, and envision an alternative future for biotic communities large and small. This course examines the literary traditions of Carson’s Silent Spring, from the Romantic poetry that inspired the title, to the fairy tale style of the book’s allegorical first chapter, “A Fable for Tomorrow.”Drawing on the rhetoric of fact and fiction in Carson’s science writing, we analyze the function of the literary imagination in U.S. environmental writing, including toxic discourse, prophetic warning, journalistic exposé, literary naturalism, and the pastoral mode. From the muckraking journalism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), to the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), which imagines a future dystopia set in the year 2024, readings explore the power and limits of writing that inspired collective action or legislative change.

Literature of Reconstruction: “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem”
This course engages with the construction of race in Reconstruction-era literature, history, and law through the work of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). Born too late for the slave narrative and too early for the Harlem Renaissance, Chesnutt fell between two major African -American literary movements: the nineteenth-century slave narrative and twentieth-century modernism. Examining storytelling and activism in his regionalist fiction, we trace the rise of Black print culture through the founding of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Methodologically, we will draw on recent work in Black Bibliography and archival recovery, examining the cultural politics of publication and canonization and the history of the regions in which Chesnutt used as settings of his fiction: North Carolina and Ohio. Fictional genres will include sentimentalism, realism, regionalism, and naturalism; the slave narrative and the social problem novel; journalism, legal writing, and essays. Authors may include Frederick Douglass, Albion Tourgee, Pauline Hopkins, Thomas Nelson Page, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

This writing-intensive Environmental Humanities course connects questions of social justice to the representation of place in a range of literary genres. Guided by analysis of written works and public-facing humanities projects operating at the intersection of environmental justice and the environmental imagination, students will develop research projects centering shared commitments to “place” by engaging with the cultural histories of our campus, from quad and canyon to classrooms and commons. What values does our environment encode, and why? What practices sustain life or exhaust it, and what lives must we work to sustain? What relationships matter most in the places we share, and how does the intersection between social and environmental justice invite us to rethink existing relationships and build new ones? How can we deepen our understanding of narrative, and generate our own persuasive writing to contribute to positive change in our campus and the communities it fosters? How do our readings frame questions and encourage critical thinking about place, and how can our experiences of place frame questions about our readings and analyses? Team taught by two faculty members in English, in collaboration with co-curricular and community partners, the classes will create a range of learning communities throughout the semester, including weekly discussions of assigned readings in two sections, full group collaborations and conversations about shared questions, project-based learning in teams formed around student partnerships and the archives they engage, and interactive public talks with invited experts in the field. This course adapts the collaboratory model to support academic analysis, writing, and research through a collective approach; students will ultimately produce scholarly work that uses narrative to convey research findings about their place-based project, informed by a deeper understanding of environmental humanities and the representation of “place.”

The twentieth-century rise of Irish theater and Irish nationalism both coalesced around an ideal of rural life independent from British colonial rule. Depopulated by waves of famine and unrelenting emigration, the green world of peasant plays and Gaelic legends envisioned alternative forms of modernity grounded in a rural past, even as theatrical audiences became increasingly urban and global. This course explores the problem of pastoral representation in the history of the Irish stage and in the staging of Irish history. From the rose gardens and leisured English lovers of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) to the faerie stories and folklore of the Celtic Twilight, we trace a legacy adapted from British literary genres and motifs, but revived and reinvented for a national tradition rooted in pre-colonial myth. Pastoral drama was not merely a retreat from partisan violence, but a site of conflict in the turbulent decades leading up to Irish independence, as we find in the cultural nationalist projects of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, and in the audience riots sparked by J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey unflinchingly unromantic portrayals of poverty and pain. Connecting historical developments to the politics of place, we analyze how Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh engage and resist the legacy of rural Ireland on the stage; topics include exile and diaspora; sectarian violence in relation to gender, class, race, and ethnicity; postcolonial theory and global Englishes; and the history of the Troubles. Although at times this bloody history seemed, as the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney put it, "about as instructive as an abattoir," the art it yielded still has the capacity "to hold in a single thought reality and justice," one of his favorite Yeats quotations. From the Celtic Revival to the Celtic Tiger, we examine the struggle between reality and justice in Irish drama, and the power of theater to create the country as it was, and as it could be. Conference.

Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll
How do the central questions, topics, and methods of the blue humanities change our understanding of nineteenth-century US fiction and its environmental legacy? This course engages with Melville’s construction of personhood, individual and collective, in Moby Dick (1851) and its wide-ranging intertexts, from Shakespearean tragedy to maritime adventure stories. We will read the novel both as a representation of the Yankee whaling industry, and as a search for its broader moral, social, and spiritual meanings. Seeking “a marine tint to the imagination,” as Henry David Thoreau puts it, we will read lesser-known works of authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Stoddard, Walt Whitman, and Louisa May Alcott. Our final unit examines posthuman and interspecies frameworks in contemporary environmental activism, as advocates seek to expand definitions of legal personhood to extend rights to non-human entities. Topics include marine biology and animal studies, petrofiction and materialist ecocriticism, environmental justice and humanities.

Nature Writing, Ecocriticism, and the Problem of Social Justice
This course explores the relationship between idyllic fictions and concrete experience through two transformative centuries of American nature writing, from travel writing and transcendentalism, to Cherokee protest poetry and regionalist short stories. We will use the paradigms we explore in the classroom—from evolving concepts of nature and wilderness to long-standing myths of agricultural improvement and property rights—to frame humanistic questions at stake in environmental and social justice initiatives. Fostering a more capacious understanding of social justice through the ecological imagination, this course acknowledges the role of storytelling in activism and advocacy, moving from models of individual rights to collective understandings of what is right for those who share a place. What can we learn about the origins of the Black freedom struggle from Charles Chesnutt’s fiction, which represents not only New Negro uplift in Northern cities, but also the leadership of disenfranchised storytellers in the rural South, who advocate for their communities by subverting the conventions of plantation pastoral and exposing the ecological and humanitarian costs of extractive capitalism? How might we deepen our understanding of US cultural history by analyzing the linkage of environmental and social disruption in dystopian discourses, or by recovering the stories and perspectives of those excluded from citizenship and still largely overlooked by current models of social justice and environmental advocacy? How does writing, past and present, imagine alternatives to ecological crisis? An upper-level course, we will reckon with the legacy of nature writing in American history and culture through ecocritical theory and criticism, current work on environmental justice and land rights, and in-depth analysis of primary sources in a range of genres. Some requirements for this course will involve community partnerships and field trips. As such, the course requires the willingness to spend some time off campus and outdoors, and to remain flexible and understanding if plans need to be adjusted.

Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, demonstrated interest in American studies or environmental studies, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

This course weaves together interconnected discourses to interrogate the premise, and obligations, of interconnectedness - environmental and social - in this age of climate crisis. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh wonders how future generations will frame this period of “derangement” - our willful ignorance of human responsibility for, and “imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of,” the climate crisis. What roles have religions played in conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the environment? We will explore a range of theoretical frameworks, from Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, to Ian Hodder’s entanglements, to Buddhist discourses on interconnectedness and co-dependent origination, paticcasamuppada. We will focus on Buddhist discourses on the first noble truth, dukkha (dis-ease, unease, suffering), in light of solastalgia (“the lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape,” coined by Glenn Albrecht) and related eco-anxiety. We will read the ecopoetics of Gary Snyder (Reed ‘51) as we imagine what the amelioration of suffering (social and environmental) might entail, and what the interdisciplinary study of Religion might offer.

This studio art class illuminates foundational painting techniques through the study of real and imagined lifeworlds. We will draw inspiration from our multispecies community to observe form and color, and to create future ecological imaginaries. We will learn introductory painting strategies for creating 2D compositions and for integrating color theory. We will develop the skills needed to conjure illusions of movement and to communicate emotion through abstraction, composition, and mark making. This class will include field trips, microscopic work, and repeated observations of a location on the Reed campus. Through this work, we will consider how an art practice can help us to imagine new futures for ecological and equitable living. Students will create multimedia paintings in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other’s work.

This introductory drawing and printmaking class takes a decolonial approach to natural history illustration and printmaking. We will consider how the visual histories of power and empire are embedded within natural history illustration and how can we attempt to repair those stories through a visual arts practice. Together, we will draw from our unique histories and relationships to the natural world in an attempt to rewild the archive through our art practices and illuminate new multispecies relationships. To do this work, we will consult the illuminated manuscripts and monoprints held in the Reed special collections. We will learn about the rich history of printmaking as a form of resistance to oppression. Students will use charcoal, colored pencils, and inks, to make multimedia works on paper in the studio and in the field. Students will be able to articulate the relationship of these visual works to the conceptual foundations of the class.

In this painting class, we will create work that is in conversation with the broader questions: Can we identify and follow specific naturecultures near and on the Reed campus? How might we paint, map, and story such specificities as we engage with our local environments as sites of knowledge? In this class we will use a contemporary painting approach to create alternative mapping narratives, trace our diasporic human and ecological relationships, and question what a decolonial painting approach could look like. This class will include lectures, videos, discussions, field trips, microscopic work, and developing a relationship with a tree of your choosing on the Reed campus. Students will create multimedia paintings in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other’s work.

This studio art class focuses on species entanglements under climate change. Working from a multimedia art practice, we will consider the ways that power structures shape the environment. How do the hauntings from ongoing species extinctions impact us and what can we do about it? To do this work, we will draw on BioArt, feminist science, community ecology, and environmental policy to develop our individual and collective artistic research practices. We will consider the material histories involved in our art making and how those materials and practices can interrogate changing ecologies. We will expand our understandings of animism and kinship with the more-than-human world and question if artistic collaboration is possible with non-humans. We will research, germinate, and caretake plants and other beings, focusing on those that have histories resisting oppression or as biomedicines. By expanding our ecological research as artists, we can illuminate new and vibrant ways to work within the environment.

What perspectives and methodologies can art history contribute to ongoing debates and research on climate change, ecological crises, and the Anthropocene in the humanities and natural sciences? This course will introduce students to innovative examples of recent art historical scholarship that postulate ecologically-conscious approaches to the study of visual and material cultures. As a discipline, art history takes objects produced by humans as its loci of analysis. By engaging with new theoretical frameworks such as postcolonial ecocriticism, new materialism, posthumanism, and critical animal studies, we will confront established art historical paradigms that have privileged the human as the primary agent of history. Rather than focusing on specific geographical places or temporal periods, we will explore the interrelation of human cultural production and ecological systems through different thematic points of inquiry, ranging from water, air, and fire to animals and eco-activism. In doing so, we aim to challenge the binaries between human and non-human to advance non-hierarchical approaches to the study of art. While open to all students with the prerequisites, this is also a required course for all declared art history majors in their junior year. Prerequisites: Art 201 and one 300-level course in art history or studio art.

This course will engage with the many ways sound mediates the meaning and experience of our natural and built environments, exploring what and how we are able to know about our world through listening. Drawing on an interdisciplinary set of literature from music, sound, media, and science and technology studies and developing a series of hands-on projects for the critical documentation and representation of sonic environments, students will gain practical and theoretical understanding of how sound articulates and speaks to larger issues of environmental and social justice in a variety of places, times, and contexts. Offered in 2025-2026.

What perspectives and methodologies can art history contribute to ongoing debates and research on climate change, ecological crises, and the Anthropocene in the humanities and natural sciences? This course will introduce students to innovative examples of recent art historical scholarship that postulate ecologically-conscious approaches to the study of visual and material cultures. As a discipline, art history takes objects produced by humans as its loci of analysis. By engaging with new theoretical frameworks such as postcolonial ecocriticism, new materialism, posthumanism, and critical animal studies, we will confront established art historical paradigms that have privileged the human as the primary agent of history. Rather than focusing on specific geographical places or temporal periods, we will explore the interrelation of human cultural production and ecological systems through different thematic points of inquiry, ranging from water, air, and fire to animals and eco-activism. In doing so, we aim to challenge the binaries between human and non-human to advance non-hierarchical approaches to the study of art. While open to all students with the prerequisites, this is also a required course for all declared art history majors in their junior year. Prerequisites: Art 201 and one 300-level course in art history or studio art.

Why did artists from the regional courts of India paint poetic visions of rains, lakes, and rivers during periods of drought? How can the ocean serve as an archive, metaphor, and method for thinking about early modern and colonial material cultures, trade, and mobility? How do media images of environmental catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina make visible—and invisible—the ocular tactics of biopolitical racism? How do our current water crises demand a wholesale rethinking of how we write and think about art? This class will focus on water as a subject and a methodology for studying early modern, colonial, and contemporary visual cultures. We will study a range of case studies, including regional Indian paintings, early modern hydro-architecture in South Asia, material cultures shaped by the Manila Galleon Trade and Indian Ocean trade networks, media images of environmental catastrophes, recent museum exhibitions on climate change, and more. Our studies will be supplemented by writings in art history, environmental humanities, anthropology, and new materialism. We will also consider the emergence of a historiography of water that has been shaped by the ecological turn in the humanities.

Western epistemology is considered to be based on a strict separation and opposition between nature and culture. While this divide is under increasing scrutiny in the face of the climate crisis in the Anthropocene, anthropology has long been a pioneer in challenging and dismantling this binary. This course examines canonical and contemporary anthropological approaches to the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We will discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by historically situated social relations and how such conceptions, in turn, shape environmental struggles across the globe. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies from the Global South oriented towards the intersections of political ecology and environmental justice, science and technology studies, postcolonial theory, and more-than-human perspectives. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture binary and its critiques, and recent environmental scholarship on issues such as agro-food systems, extractive conflicts, toxicity, genetic engineering, climate change, disasters, microbial lives, and multispecies entanglements.

This course introduces students to the major themes of twentieth-century American environmental history in order to address one central question: what does “nature” mean in modern America, for whom, and why? Beginning with the closing of the continental frontier in 1893, we will approach the United States as both a unique constellation of material and geographical spaces, and as a changing and historically contingent cultural construct dependent on ideas about power, labor, identity, and morality. The course will introduce students to a variety of frameworks for understanding Americans’ relationship to the natural environment in the twentieth century, and topics will range from coyote eradication programs to the contours of mid-century conservation movements to the cultural meanings of the plastic pink flamingo.

This course is a chance to introduce students to American environmental history from the settling of New England to the development of a modern industrial twentieth-century nation. Building from William Cronon’s landmark Changes in the Land, we will focus on the changing historically-specific meanings of nature, landscape, and place through the story of America’s physical and economic expansion; first in the East, then in the nineteenth century West, and finally in the modern nation as a whole. Alongside our exploration of American environmental history, we will also seek to develop and hone the skills of environmental history research in practice through a series of assignments exploring the environmental history of our own back yard: the Reed Campus. By the end of the semester, students should not only have a solid understanding of some of the major themes in American environmental history, they should also be familiar with the methods and processes of doing environmental history here at Reed.

This seminar approaches the study of “world environmental history” as a fascinating problem of  historical methodology. We begin by introducing environmental history at its largest scales of time and space, investigating how climate, biodiversity, natural resources and commodities have affected human history on a global level. We will focus on the problems of agency, contingency, and causality that arise when historians attempt to meaningfully incorporate the natural world into broad historical analyses. With these same questions in mind, we will then move on to a series of more specific case studies that complicate our historical analysis. As we visit the toxic waters and fields of modern Japan, the denuded countryside of Imperial China, and the socially-stratified villages of northern India, we will see how culture, memory, religion, and power shape reciprocal relationships between humans and their geographically-unique surroundings in a number of different ways. Finally, before students branch out into their own research, we will investigate how these different valances of environmental history have informed a twentieth-century regime of global environmental governance—a regime born of good intentions, but one replete with problems of efficacy, equitability, and justice. 

The course carries a significant reading load, and students should be prepared to read on average  around 200–250 pages of material per week. Written assignments include a number of short summaries; a historiographical essay; and a larger research proposal that, along with its component parts, constitutes the major assignment of the course.

Hear the words "Earth" or "world" or "globe" and the image likely to flash through the mind is the descendant of a photo commonly known as Blue Marble (1972), which reveals the disk of our terraqueous planet suspended alone in the void. It is reputed to be the most widely disseminated photograph in human history, and together with other views of the Earth from beyond has prompted a revolution in the global imagination. The aim of this seminar is to assess the plausibility of that claim, by situating these images in their diverse historical contexts.

These contexts include the history of humankind's imaginative self-projection into the beyond from ancient times to our day; how the "whole earth" image has been mobilized by environmental campaigns, political movements, and commercial enterprises; how the view of Earth has figured in economics ("globalization theory"), aesthetics (earth art, architecture, mapping and visualization techniques), philosophy (especially in the phenomenological tradition), and the natural sciences (the Gaia hypothesis, the biosphere projects, and earth systems science); and how this pictorial imaginary has become integrated into the unthought ways we inhabit our natural and human-built worlds—what has happened once its ubiquity meant that we ceased, in a fashion, to see it. Arrangements will be made to enable students to explore new media and research tools for analysis and presentation, should they wish to do so.

This class traces a genealogy of ideas about animality as they have emerged in Western thought and culture. The narrative of the course proceeds from ancient ideas about animality, soul, and dominion to their reception in medieval philosophy and theology, and later in early modern and Enlightenment philosophy, science, and law (“animal trials”); to the Darwinian revolution; to post-Darwinian arguments about animal lives (intelligence, interests, experience), deaths (food, slaughter), laws (rights, legal status), and loves (companion species). Throughout, we will consider the question: How has recourse to the notion of animality helped make sense of what it means to be human?

Informed by recent scholarship in environmental humanities and critical indigenous studies, this course explores the histories and varieties of cultural expression of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Europe, North America, and Eurasia. Our main focus will be works of film and literature by Saami, Nenets, Sakha, Yukagir, Chukchi, and Inuit activists, culture workers, and knowledge keepers. By centering Indigenous worldviews and aesthetic systems, we will attempt to move beyond a view of the Arctic as an object of settler imagination and desire, and instead place it at the center of complex systems of human and more-than-human relations. From this perspective, we will analyze how legacies of colonialism and resource extraction have shaped the present realities of climate change and geopolitical conflict affecting us all. Ultimately this course seeks to equip students to contribute to future-oriented strategies of survival, on both local and global levels.

One-unit semester course. This course is a comparative study of the nuclear theme in several literary traditions which are usually treated separately: Japanese literature on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Soviet and post-Soviet reactions to the ecological disasters at Chernobyl, Semipalatinsk, and other sites; American literature of the Cold War; and contemporary literary and artistic reactions to the 2011 disaster at Fukushima. We will also examine the interrelationship of political rhetoric, scientific language, and poetic language in the way nuclear power is imagined, implemented, experienced, and resisted. Our comparative approach will be informed by readings from the schools of postcolonialism, eco-criticism, and critical Indigenous theory. We will focus not only on the Atomic Age’s legacy of human and environmental devastation, but also the geopolitical, existential, and epistemological questions raised by the threat of nuclear accidents and warfare. Conducted in English.

Haunting is central to postcolonial thought and literature. This course examines the aesthetics of haunting in postcolonial novels from the latter half of the twentieth century. Haunting invites us to radically rethink the relations between the past and the present in terms of their contemporaneity and interdependence. It also makes us examine the relationship between subjectivity, embodiment, and place. We will reflect on alternative space and temporalities opened up by literary evocations of ghosts, phantoms, and specters, and explore the themes of memory, loss and trauma in various historical and cultural contexts. How might the language of haunting help us understand the unresolved histories of colonial, racial, nationalist, sexist, and ecological violence? How do these texts register the experience of loss? In what ways do narrative texts imagine the possibility of justice by opening up a space for reexamining and reinterpreting the past in the present and alternative modes of inhabiting space and place? This course will put postcolonial narrative texts in conversation with various postcolonial and poststructuralist theories, psychoanalysis, critical race and indigenous theories and posthumanist and ecocritical writings. Primary texts will include works by Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Patricia Grace, Erna Brodber, and Maisy Card.

This writing-intensive Environmental Humanities course connects questions of social justice to the representation of place in a range of literary genres. Guided by analysis of written works and public-facing humanities projects operating at the intersection of environmental justice and the environmental imagination, students will develop research projects centering shared commitments to “place” by engaging with the cultural histories of our campus, from quad and canyon to classrooms and commons. What values does our environment encode, and why? What practices sustain life or exhaust it, and what lives must we work to sustain? What relationships matter most in the places we share, and how does the intersection between social and environmental justice invite us to rethink existing relationships and build new ones? How can we deepen our understanding of narrative, and generate our own persuasive writing to contribute to positive change in our campus and the communities it fosters? How do our readings frame questions and encourage critical thinking about place, and how can our experiences of place frame questions about our readings and analyses? Team taught by two faculty members in English, in collaboration with co-curricular and community partners, the classes will create a range of learning communities throughout the semester, including weekly discussions of assigned readings in two sections, full group collaborations and conversations about shared questions, project-based learning in teams formed around student partnerships and the archives they engage, and interactive public talks with invited experts in the field. This course adapts the collaboratory model to support academic analysis, writing, and research through a collective approach; students will ultimately produce scholarly work that uses narrative to convey research findings about their place-based project, informed by a deeper understanding of environmental humanities and the representation of “place.”