Professor Christine Marran (Chair of Asian + Middle Eastern Studies Department and Co-Convener of the Environmental Humanities Initiative) and I (Kale Fajardo, Asian American Studies + American Studies + Coordinator of the Asian Studies + Environmental Humanities (ASEH) Research Cluster are speaking on a panel on  “Forced Migration and the Climate Crisis,” along with the Executive Director of the International Institute of Minnesota.

The Human Rights Student Association organized this event and they will serve Somali food. 

DATE: Wed, December 4th

TIME: 6-7:30

LOCATION: Burton 123

Ecocriticism, Community Engagement, and the Future of German Studies: A Symposium

November 1, 2019

Contemporary environmental challenges ranging from climate change and biodiversity loss to social justice issues have accelerated the interdisciplinary turn in German studies toward the environmental humanities. This interest has catalyzed the work of scholars in many domains and motivated the development of innovative creative approaches to curriculum design. It has also raised awareness of the need for collaborative efforts and community connections. This symposium will explore the intersection of German studies with environmental humanities in terms of scholarship, curriculum, and community, with the intent of broadening the impact of projects and expanding the wider scholarly network that is now developing. The event is hosted by the Center for German and European Studies and Environmental Humanities Initiative (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities) and funded by DAAD. It will include presentations of current scholarly projects, opportunities for networking, and a panel focusing on content, methods, and resources for our courses and community partnerships. Invited speakers from the Twin Cities area will describe concrete examples of initiatives that have successfully brought together German Studies, environmental humanities, and local sustainability efforts. Read more.

Ecocriticism, Community Engagement, and the Future of German Studies: A Symposium

November 1, 2019

Contemporary environmental challenges ranging from climate change and biodiversity loss to social justice issues have accelerated the interdisciplinary turn in German studies toward the environmental humanities. This interest has catalyzed the work of scholars in many domains and motivated the development of innovative creative approaches to curriculum design. It has also raised awareness of the need for collaborative efforts and community connections. This symposium will explore the intersection of German studies with environmental humanities in terms of scholarship, curriculum, and community, with the intent of broadening the impact of projects and expanding the wider scholarly network that is now developing. The event is hosted by the Center for German and European Studies and Environmental Humanities Initiative (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities) and funded by DAAD. It will include presentations of current scholarly projects, opportunities for networking, and a panel focusing on content, methods, and resources for our courses and community partnerships. Invited speakers from the Twin Cities area will describe concrete examples of initiatives that have successfully brought together German Studies, environmental humanities, and local sustainability efforts. Read more.

Lecture Series: Faust and the Environment

September 23, 2019

A Lecture With Heather Sullivan

For Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), the relationship between the physical world and human existence constitutes a dynamic system of energy, matter, and living things that is complexly entangled with how our mental perceptions function. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his dramatic work Faust, where the relationship between nature and culture surfaces as a pivotal theme that is deeply connected to Goethe’s varied scientific interests in geology, optics, weather, plants, and many other domains. Prof. Sullivan will explore the sense of environment found in Faust in terms of its historical context and in in connections with the perspectives of ecocriticism.

Heather I. Sullivan is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas). A contributor to the edited collections Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (2011), Material Ecocriticism (2014) and Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (2017), Sullivan’s research spans German, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary studies, focusing on the interface between literature and science. She co-edited German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (2017) and The Early History of Embodied Cognition from 1740–1920 (2016) as well as special issues on ecocriticism for the journals New German Critique(2016), Colloquia Germanica (2014), and ISLE (2012). She is currently working on a book project that examines aspects of vegetal agency, green horror, and multispecies justice.

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Art in an Age of Crisis: Does Environmental Literature Change Minds and Mobilize Readers?

September 5, 2019

A Lunchtime Workshop with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

For decades, ecocritics and environmental humanists have asserted and assumed that environmentally-engaged literature has a powerful and positive impact on readers, but rarely have these claims been tested. Through a discussion of his research on the readership and influence of climate change fiction, Dr. Schneider-Mayerson will explore the value and potential of empirical ecocriticism—a new field of study that combines humanistic and social scientific methodologies to evaluate the impact of environmental narratives (across media) on their audiences—in this era of accelerating climate crisis.

Organized by the Environmental Humanities Initiative, and co-sponsored by the departments of English and American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts.

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College. He has published articles and book chapters on environmental literature, environmental politics, environmental futures, and popular culture. The author of Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture and co-editor of An Ecotopian Lexicon, he is currently writing a monograph on reproductive choices in the age of climate change and co-editing a book on empirical ecocriticism.

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May 3, 2019

March 14, 2019

Organized in partnership with the Institute for Advanced Study, "Energy: An Environmental Humanities Symposium" brings together two leading historians of energy transformations, five innovative scholars working in the Energy Humanities, and a screening of the film Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock. The symposium will take place in the Crosby Seminar Room and Best Buy Theater in Northrop on Thursday, March 14, 2019, from noon - 8 p.m. Details are on the poster below. We hope you can join us for part or all of what should be a critical conversation about humanistic questions related to energy: How have energy exploration and exploitation shaped human history and the planet? What stories have we told ourselves about coal, oil, and solar power? What means exist to help us reach a just energy future?

March 1, 2019 to March 2, 2019

The Environmental Humanities Initiative, the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, and Cinema in the Cities are sponsoring a film series titled Intimate Ecologies: Where Forests, Rivers, and Skies Speak.

Two free screening events featuring filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong will be held March 1st and 2nd. Suwichakornpong completed her MFA program at Columbia University. Her first feature, Mundane History, won numerous awards, including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. Her second feature, By the Time it Gets Dark, was chosen as Thailand's Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.A prolific producer, she is the founder of Electric Eel Films and co-founder of the film fund Purin Pictures.

On March 1st from 4:00-7:00 pm, Suwichakornpong will give a talk titled "Independent Thai Cinema today" followed by a screening of Mundane History in Nicholson 275. You can also RSVP to this event on Facebook. 

On March 2nd from 3:30-5:30 pm, the Trylon will host a free screening of By the Time it Gets Dark and Suwichakornpong will be present for a Q&A. Visit the Trylon's website to reserve a free ticket to this screening. You can also RSVP to this event on Facebook.

Both events are open to the public.

Climate in Motion Reading Group

February 26, 2019

Co-sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and the Center for Austrian Studies, the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World has organized a reading group to discuss Deborah Coen's 2018 book Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (University of Chicago Press). A fascinating look into how Habsburg empire politics helped shape modern climate science, the book lies at the intersection of environmental humanities, history of science, European studies, and other fields. The group will meet roughly once per month during the Spring semester and conclude in Fall 2019 with a visit by the author.

The first meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, February 26, at noon in 710 Social Sciences. To participate, please email [email protected].

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Writing about Early Modern Nature: A Lunchtime Workshop with Peter C. Mancall

February 14, 2019 

This presentation will explore European and Native American conceptions of nature during a period of radical ecological change in the Atlantic basin and expand on themes in Prof. Mancall’s Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). The book, an environmental history of parts of the Atlantic basin, will be the starting point for a discussion about how to write nature’s history in the early modern era.

Co-sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Initiative and the Center for Early Modern History in the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts.

Peter C. Mancall is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute, and Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is author of numerous books, including Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson—A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic and Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America.

The EHI community is invited the dissertation defense of Kiley Kost on Friday, December 14, 9:30am in Folwell 113. 

The dissertation title is: "Telling Deep Time: Geologic Narration in German Fiction since 1945"

You are invited to the public presentation, which will last approximately 30 minutes and include an opportunity for questions from the audience. Following the public portion, the discussion will continue in closed session with the committee. 

Mary Lindemann, President of German Studies Association and Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Miami, will deliver the keynote address for the Early Modern War and the Formation of Europe conference on Friday, November 16 at 12:15 pm in 1210 Heller Hall. This talk is titled "The Ecological and Environmental Consequences of the Thirty Years War: Longue durée and histoire événementielle" and is presented by the Center for Austrian Studies, the Center for German and European Studies, and the Center for Early Modern History.

September 21, 2018

Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea (1955) highlights how coastal forms of nonhuman life adjust to conditions of life on the shore and to its “vast tidal rhythms.” Of the calcareous sponges that live among the seaweeds on the coast of Maine, she writes that they “give to the cave and its pool their special quality—the sense of a continuing flow of time…they seem unchanged.” This paper connects Carson’s idea of what “seem[s] unchanged” to a specific point in psychoanalysis’s narrative of loss, where the tension between letting go of an object that is external (mourning) and the incorporation of the lost object (melancholia) persists to such an extent that the indeterminacy of the internal/external object becomes the matter at hand for interpretation. I find this indeterminacy, or nondifferentiation between subject and object, to be at the heart of psychical responses to environmental destruction. Fantasies of interconnectedness in Tim Morton’s idea of “ecological thought” and in environmental psychology--which identify apathy, denial, and melancholia as problems and offer “real grieving” or a vision of ecological interconnectedness as corrective--miss the role that is played by psychical resistance and nondifferentiation. Like Freud’s own attempt to read the oceanic, they try to straiten the undifferentiated state at “the edge of the sea,” what Harold F. Searles calls “the nonhuman environment.” I explore the double binds and questionable limitations that result from humanist psychological and ecomaterialist approaches to climate change.

October 12, 2018 

How over the course of the last 150 years has the study of space, land, and environment changed? This session will explore twenty-first century environmental humanities perspectives regarding human interactions with the places we inhabit, environmental justice questions, and relationships between the local and global.

Panel: Charlotte Melin (moderator), Kate Derickson, Christine Marran, Dan Philippon

Part of CLA’s 150th Anniversary Faculty celebration - CLA Time Past, Time Present, Time Future, October 9-12, 2018

October 19, 2018

Nuclear Asia: Prospects for Peace

Saturday, October 20, 2018
Metropolitan State University, St. Paul Campus
Room 101 and Lounge, Student Center
An Outreach Event held in conjunction with the MCAA
Free and Open to the Public

North Korea’s nuclear negotiations make the headlines regularly. However, North Korea is not the only country that poses a nuclearthreat in Asia. The MCAA 2018 outreach program plans a public engagement event, a film and panel discussion program on the past, present, and future of nuclear weapons and technology in Asia. The event will take place in conjunction with the MCAA 2018 at Metropolitan State University. After showing recent documentaries, panelists – composed of scholars and civic organization leaders -- will present on North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and peace education, and have an open discussion with the audience. A reception will follow in orderto provide a space for community citizens, students, educators, and
scholars to meet and continue discussion. Read more.

February 8, 2018

A case study of public debate around a proposed natural gas transmission pipeline in Southwest Virginia. Led by Professor Robert S. Emmett.

The fracturing of political culture in the U.S., impoverishing notions of the "public," is creating casualties of environmental injustice through energy choices made nominally on behalf of the greatest public good. As part of a wider exploration of cultural adaptations in the late fossil fuel era, Prof. Emmett will examine the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project, which represents one of dozens of natural gas transmission lines proposed or under construction from North Carolina to New York. These would bring fracked natural gas from the Utica and Marcellus formations to domestic and foreign markets. Yet MVP also poses unique challenges: it will cross over 300 miles of rugged topography, including karst formations (sinkholes, limestone caves), major tributaries of the New River, and the viewshed of the Appalachian Trail. Over the last five years, advocacy and resistance to the MVP project has taken shape through lawsuits, land art, impact statements, documentary films, and public forums. The region it would span gains more economically from outdoor recreation tourism each year; it stands to gain less than it may lose from "flyover" infrastructure. Thus MVP represents a paradigmatic case for evaluating claims to justice and public interest at two scales: on behalf of the nation, pursuing elusive "cleaner" fuel independence; and, on behalf of planetary climate justice, providing a "bridge fuel" to rapidly developing countries. Who then belongs to the public served by MVP-style energy infrastructure? And how might cultural forms from land art to community forests help us imagine alternative futures?

Prof. Emmett's lecture will be followed by an interactive workshop on how to do environmental humanities scholarship, based on his new book, The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction.

Robert S. Emmett is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Roanoke College Environmental Studies program. He is the author of Cultivating Environmental Justice: A Literary History of US Garden Writing (UMass Press, 2016) and with David E. Nye, The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (MIT Press, 2017). With Gregg Mitman and Marco Armiero, he edited the forthcoming collection of critical reflections and works of art, Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (U of Chicago Press, 2018). From 2013-2015 he served as Director of Academic Programs at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany.

Sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Initiative, which seeks to catalyze research, foster pedagogical innovation, and enhance public outreach among faculty and graduate students interested in broadly humanistic approaches to environmental issues that stretch across the globe. EHI is made possible by the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts.

February 21, 2018

The Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World is bringing Ellen Arnold, an alumna of the UMN History Department and Associate Professor of History at Ohio Wesleyan University, to campus for a lecture and workshop on February 21st. This event is co-sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

At 4 pm in Heller Hall 1210, Professor Arnold will present at talk entitled "Poetic Riverscapes in the Early Middle Ages." 

Abstract

This talk will use the writings of three early medieval poets to argue the environmental imagination of pre-modern works contains the same complexity, nuance, and creativity that marks modern environmentally-inflected works. Though medieval writers are not often credited with imagining the complex interactions of what we would now call ecosystems, their literary riverscapes reflect an awareness of the complex connections within and alongside rivers. Explicating these early medieval texts highlights the complex ways these medieval authors understood rivers and show us the altered ways that we, on the other side of the modern/pre-modern divide, imagine and experience rivers and their denizens.

Workshop

Prior to Professor Arnold's lecture, the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World will host an informal graduate student lunch workshop at noon on February 21st in Heller Hall 1210. This is an opportunity for graduate students to meet with Professor Arnold and discuss her experiences teaching and conducting research in environmental history. Students interested in attending the lunch are asked to RSVP via this Google Form by February 15th.

Professor Arnold's current research focuses on the ways medieval people incorporated nature and the environment into both their everyday life and into their cultural imagination. In spring 2012, she was a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Studies, working on a history of medieval views of rivers and water control. More on Professor Arnold is available here: https://www.owu.edu/academics/departments-programs/department-of-history...

February 23, 2018

All are invited to attend an informational and brainstorming session on the latest venture of the Humanities Action Lab (HAL).  The University of Minnesota is a founding member of HAL, and this meeting will cover opportunities to involve students and community partners in this major international project over the next several years.  Faculty and students interested in environmental justice, public and digital humanities, and community-engaged pedagogy are especially encouraged to attend!

Launched in October 2017, the Humanities Action Lab's first international initiative centers communities who bear the greatest burden of environmental degradation, yet have sustained campaigns against injustice. These communities include (im)migrant, African American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. Ultimately, a traveling exhibition and digital platform will reveal deep investigations of resilience, mitigation and adaptation. 

The session will be led by Dr. Aleia Brown, Project Director of the Humanities Action Lab and co-creator of #museumsrespondtoferguson.

Please contact Kevin Murphy at [email protected] for more information.  

Humanities Action Lab:  https://www.humanitiesactionlab.org/

March 1, 2018

How are programs of language, literatures and cultures revitalizing through connection with environmental humanities initiatives and alliances with sustainability studies? This symposium brings together scholar/teachers whose work in and beyond the classroom has been catalyzed by their commitment to curricular innovation, interdisciplinary projects, and public engagement with climate change issues. The symposium’s purpose is to facilitate dialogue about educational redesign in the humanities as a collaborative intellectual project that crosses fields ranging from language, literature, national/transnational, and cultural studies to second language acquisition and STEM. This shift impacts undergraduate and graduate education, and situates language programs at the forefront of institutional change. Presentations and roundtable discussions will explore theoretical frameworks, innovative curricular models (from design thinking projects to learning abroad), and implementation strategies for the enhanced teaching of languages and cultures in our multilingual world as a means for exploring cultural narratives, values, and perspectives related to the environment.

Keynote Speaker
Katherine Arens (University of Texas-Austin)

Plenary Speakers
Elena Past (Wayne State University)
Maggie Broner (St. Olaf College)

Conference sponsors: Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA); Department of German, Scandinavian & Dutch; Environmental Humanities Initiative

Conference co-sponsors: Institute for Advanced Study; Institute for Global Studies; Institute on the Environment; Center for German and European Studies; CLA Language Center; Department of Asian Languages and Literatures; Department of English; Department of French & Italian; Department of Spanish & Portuguese

Please join us for the following lecture by Mahesh Rangarajan, Professor of History and Dean of Academic Affairs, Ashoka University:

A quarter century since economic reform began, issues of the environment loom large in Indian public life.  Atmospheric pollution in large cities such as Delhi, floods in Mumbai and Chennai, continuing debates on large development projects and the issue of imperiled species, fragmented forests and loss of fertile agricultural land: these are but a small sample of live controversies. In an earlier era, impelled both by grass roots movements and middle class concern, ideas of ecological patriotism in the eminent domain and community control at another level, India saw major initiatives in the form of legislation, executive action and civic initiative.  But as it seeks to be an emerging power, do alternative visions have less not more space ? Does the growth of mega cities put paid to programs of local rural empowerment? What are the wider implications for Asia and the world of the ways in which India's democracy grapples with the ecological dilemma?

October 10, 2017

In her talk, Ms. Tomisawa will discuss what happened to the residents of Futaba in the aftermath of the tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, addressing how the residents were informed of the plant meltdown and the subsequent evacuation. She will describe how the chaos following a forced evacuation was made worse with the secondary blows of discrimination against survivors and food shortages. She will also discuss how people continue to survive the forced evacuation still in effect and what is happening not only to human beings, but to the animals left behind in restricted areas, and the current needs in her hometown.

Ms. Tomisawa has eleven years of experience brewing premium sake (rice wine) and shochu (distilled rice spirits) for her nearly 300-year-old family business, which was destroyed in the triple catastrophe of March 11, 2011. She is preparing to re-establish the brewery next year in Seattle, Washington.

September 29, 2017

September 12, 2017

The Rasa Island in Okinawa, once bustling with phosphate mining, is now a deserted island used for the US fleet target practice. The Iwami Mine, long closed due to the depletion of silver, just became a UNESCO World Heritage Site this summer. These two contrasting mining sites in Japan tell fascinating stories of how ecological discourse started to intersect with heritage making and how a post-industrial society remembers industrialisation.

Hiromi Mizuno is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. She is currently writing a book, The Age of Nitrogen: Agricultural Modernization and Japan and has recently finished co-editing a forthcoming book, Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development, and the Cold War Order.

May 10, 2017

Jonathan Damery will be defending his MFA Thesis, "Plainlands: How to See Nothing." Drinks and snacks will be provided.

May 8, 2017

This interactive discussion with Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation and Elder Carlie Towne of the Gullah/Geechee Angel Network will focus on the components of cultural continuation that are often left out of the discussions of sustainability and adaptation. The traditional knowledge and collective consciousness of the Gullah/Geechee and how they are incorporating this in methods to protect tangible resources and their cultural heritage for future generations will be central to the dialogue.

March 24, 2017 

Professor and Chair of English at the University of Toronto, Dr. Bewell will argue that colonial natural history is best understood as a translational activity, which made natures accessible, comparable, and exchangable by recasting them in new mobilized forms. By seeing colonial natures as products of translation, we can begin to recognize what was gained and lost through this encompassing activity. This topic will be examined with reference to Audubon's Birds of America and Keats's Lamia. Dr. Bewell this year published Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (Johns Hopkins University Press). Presented by the 18th- and 19th-Century Subfield and the Zabel fund of the Department of English.

May 1, 2017

Even after the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, popular discourse on nuclear energy was positive. Why did this positive image of the nuclear reign despite the catastrophic experiences of 1945?  This talk explores this paradox with a new perspective that challenges the conventional victim narrative of Japan to show how scientists, media, and the public were all involved in the production of the “atomic utopia.”

Dr. Maika Nakao is a visiting scholar at Columbia University and senior researcher at Ritsumeikan University.

May 5, 2017