Class Information
Instructor: Elizabeth Miller, Louis Warren
CRN: 45365
Time: W 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Description
EVH200 is the core seminar for graduate students from various disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and beyond with an interest in pursuing the new Designated Emphasis in Environmental Humanities. The seminar will introduce participants to key issues, themes, questions, and debates in the field through discussions of classic and contemporary readings in the main fields that have contributed to environmental humanities scholarship. In addition to close engagement with specific texts, emphasis will be placed on high-level understanding of the history of the field and the interrelationships between its various elements and on the most significant questions in current research. By the end of the seminar, students will be able to situate any environmental humanities project in its historical, aesthetic, and ideological contexts, and to understand how environmental scholarship in their home disciplines connect to work carried on in other fields. Students will also be introduced to the institutional infrastructure of the environmental humanities, including university programs, journals, academic presses, and professional organizations, and to key pedagogical modes such as field teaching.
Tentative Readings:
Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses" (2009)
William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness" (1996)
Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (2019) (selections)
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) (selections)
Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg?s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) (selections)
Tiffany King, "Racial Ecologies: Black Landscapes in Flux" (2013)
Rosalyn R. LaPier, Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (selections)
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016) (selections)
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015) (selections)
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2013) (selections)
Mart A. Stewart, "If John Muir Had Been an Agrarian: American Environmental History Through West and South," Environment and History (May, 2005): 139-162.
Richard White, Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1996)
Kyle Whyte, "Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises" (2018) and/or "Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice" (2018)