spring 2024
english / ies / honors 264: literature & environment
Cross-listed with Miami’s Institute for the Environment and Sustainability (IES) and linked to a university-wide series of talks and events on the topic of Environmental Justice, this course asks: In an age of environmental crisis, what use are the humanities? It’s obvious why we need the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math establish the facts about climate change and devise potential countermeasures and solutions. Maybe the place of literature is to communicate the information that scientists and engineers discover, or to offer us an occasional mental break from the realities of the Anthropocene (the era of human-driven climate crisis that we now inhabit)? That seems to be the answer our culture is settling for: art as “science communication” or escapism. And if we accept that answer, then it makes perfect sense to study just about anything other than literature right now.
This course, however, fully rejects the idea that we have somehow reached a moment in human history when literature and literary study are expendable, ornamental, or even of secondary importance. Centering on literature in multiple genres and other, related forms of art—-documentary film, narrative photography, podcasts—-this course will dramatically expand your skills of literary analysis, while affirming the indispensability of literature and literary study to comprehending and addressing our ongoing climate emergency. Together we will discover how classic works of contemporary and historical art—-many of which may seem at first to have no relevance at all to the present-—are exactly what we require for grasping and grappling with the spatial and temporal complexities of environmental injustice, and then imagining and designing a different, more just and survivable future.
Fall 2023
HUManities 490 / 590: Environmental Justice for surviving and thriving in the anthropocene
This team-taught, advanced, interdisciplinary humanities course is linked directly to the Miami University Humanities Center’s year-long John W. Altman seminar in Environmental Justice (2023-24). Our key question will be how the humanities can contribute to justice at a time of global environmental crisis, knowing that the answer to this question varies based on the social and historical conditions of those impacted differently by environmental degradation. Across the course of the semester we will draw upon texts from multiple disciplines, fields, time periods, and genres to produce our own understandings of justice and other concepts central to the goals of collective surviving and thriving during a period of unprecedented human-driven planetary climate change broadly known as the “Anthropocene.” Such concepts will include “environmental racism,” “climate justice,” “slow violence,” “treadmill of production,” “postgrowth,” “decolonial ecology,” “kinship,” and “staying with the trouble,” Donna Haraway’s call to forge unexpected collaborations and combinations that counter the damage of human exceptionalism with multispecies alliances. Readings will include short selections from secondary sources in numerous fields—including literature, sociology, history, environmental history, Black studies, and Indigenous studies—alongside primary texts from many cultures, time periods, and genres, including poetry, documentary film, creative nonfiction, novel, and essay. Many readings will be drawn from work by speakers who come to campus for the Altman Seminar.
Spring 2022
ENGlish 710 Graduate seminar: “The Sea Around Us”
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar takes its title from Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (1951), which explores the complex and interdependent relations between humans and the more-than-human world of the sea. We, in turn, will explore these relations by engaging with several major concepts that the sea has generated in the work of scholars, artists, and writers of diverse identities since 1800, including the longue durée (Fernand Braudel), archipelagic thought (Édouard Glissant), the Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy), the repeating island (Antonio Benítez-Rojo), the wake (Christina Sharpe), the Black Shoals (Tiffany Lethabo King), and the Blue Humanities (Steve Mentz). In addition to selections from Carson's sea writings, primary sources will come from many genres and likely include works by Olaudah Equiano, Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, Zora Neale Hurston, M. NourbeSe Philip, Chris Jordan, A.S. Byatt, Ellen Gallagher, and Drexciya (an electronic music duo from Detroit). The course will provide students with more than a deeper understanding of human / sea relations across time. It will also expand our repertoires of analytical approaches to literature and culture, with particular focus upon the intersections of race, gender, class, and environment; illuminate the many genealogies and possible futures of the still-emerging field of Environmental Humanities (EH); and provide a scholarly grounding in EH approaches and methodologies that can be employed in almost any area of specialization.
English 225 Advanced composition: Writing As Environmental Activism
In this advanced composition course students will engage in a semester-long research project, integrating sources and methods from multiple academic disciplines and in different genres that explore environmental injustices in relation to their various effects on particular human communities. Guiding questions include: How are environmental concerns expressed differently in different genres? What different kinds of information do we learn about environmental problems through texts from differing sources? What rhetorical features and genres are best suited to communicate various environmental injustices and solutions to different audiences? Our semester will be divided into three parts. In Part 1 we will practice and improve the foundational skills of rhetorical and genre analysis. Part 2 develops the skills of locating, summarizing, evaluating, analyzing, and reflecting on textual sources in different genres that address a central research question from different disciplinary perspectives. Part 3 puts into practice the skills developed in Parts 1 and 2: students will select and research an environmental injustice that adversely impacts a particular human community, choose the genre best suited to communicate that issue to a specific audience best positioned to assist the community under consideration, and then compose a text in that genre as the final assignment.