Course Description
Humanities scholars from different disciplines and countries have noted the need for radically new methodological approaches in view of the unprecedented destruction of the planet, its natural resources, and its species. The rise of the Environmental Humanities is a response by the Academy to this insight. What brings scholars and students together is an interest in confronting environmental change as both a natural and a cultural phenomenon, and an intent to inhabit, in the words of eco-critic Ursula Heise, a “space of simultaneous critique and action”—something that lies beyond the university’s traditional structure.
One of the key features of the new field of environmental humanities is that it recognizes the limitations of particular disciplines. As a result, it encourages us to explore areas beyond our own expertise, from a wide variety of disciplines and also from outside academia.
This course introduces students to a broad spectrum of methods for studying past environmental change and the human cultural contexts within which it occurs. It serves as a one-of-a kind gateway into the various disciplines and approaches (textual and non-textual) that help us understand environmental change over time: from geology to ecology and from history to environmental anthropology. We will learn how scholars from different disciplines study and analyze the relationship between nature and culture, environment and society, what questions they ask and how they construct narratives and arguments.
Special exploratory assignments for the seminar are designed to cultivate curiosity, research skills and methods. Students will bring to class primary documents, images, interviews, maps etc. in order to show what these sources can tell about the relationship between humans and the environment, and to explore the disparate forms of evidence that can be used to reconstruct past environmental change and its human meanings.
Students will learn about different research methods and approaches through a set of readings but also through museum visits and guided walks. They will be asked to explore the streets and canals of Venice and/or one of the Venetian museums (e.g. Museo Storico Navale, Museo civico di storia naturale di Venezia, Museo Correr) and study a specific site (ideally related to the Venetian lagoon and issues of time) from different angles and academic disciplines.

Themes
What is wilderness? What is environmentalism? And what is it all good for?
What is Nature?
Nature Writing - Writing Nature: Environmental Ethics and Aesthetics
The Anthropocene, the Death and the End of Nature
Climate Change and what can we do about it?
Environmental History - Environments in History
Maps and Mapping
Walking as a Research Method
Eating Environments
Biodiversity Loss and Extinction Stories
Ecocriticism
Music, Sound and Changing Environments
The Agency of Non-Humans

Learning Outcomes
In this class, students will learn what it means to be an inter- and multidisciplinary scholar in the field of the Environmental Humanities. They will learn what different skills one needs for reading different kinds of scholarly communication. And they will gain an understanding of how a scientific article, for instance, differs from an article in a humanities discipline like history or literature. At the end of the course, students will have answers to some of the following questions: : What is evidence, and what constitutes forms of evidence in different disciplinary domains? What are the differences between quantitative and qualitative information, and how are they used differently across scholarly domains? How do we tell stories, and what are the opportunities and hazards of narrative as a rhetorical form?
We will define the meaning of discipline, and ask how we know that we are in one. We will ask how one can find one's bearings both within and between disciplinary spaces. Altogether we will define and learn how we can become effective researchers and communicators in the new field of Environmental Humanities.
Upon completion of the course, students will have a better understanding of how they can best communicate their scholarly and scientific insights beyond the boundaries of their discipline, both to peers from other fields and to the larger public. They will be able to employ a range of critical methods, conceptual models and theoretical approaches to the global environmental humanities; articulate an awareness of place through investigation, observation and engagement with local ecologies. They will also reflect upon how found objects, texts, images and experiences have affected them as readers, observers, and researchers.
In working on their research paper they will learn what constitutes an interesting and important research question--and what shapes our judgment in deciding whether or not a question is "significant". In presenting their research paper (both orally and in writing) they will learn how to synthesize different analytical insights and different forms of knowledge to produce a unified argument.
Students will identify the specific contribution of the humanities in the exploration of environments. Scientists who work on big data and computer modelling can tell us something quantitatively about where we are heading; biotechnologists and engineers who plan interventions in natural processes and earth systems have grand plans to move us forward. But neither environmental science nor engineering give us a true sense and understanding of where we are coming from as humans and where we should be heading.

Teaching and evaluation methods
Discussion of texts is the heart of this course. It provides an opportunity for each student to examine the major issues in a critical light, to move beyond just reading “comprehension” to a deeper level of understanding. I will occasionally give short lectures to provide more context or to explore a particular issue in greater depth. At times I will bring in maps, historical documents, or focused projects that students will work on in small groups. Besides reading and discussing texts, this class strives to incorporate local observation and field elements

Evaluations will be based on mini responses, classroom participation, a short synthetic essay and an original research-based essay:
Weekly Mini-Reponses and participation in classroom discussion (30 % of grade)/ For each of the class readings students will need to come up with two questions of clarification or curiosity. Full credit will be given to responses that are thoughtful and provocative; and to students who take an active part in the classroom discussion.
Short Synthetic Essay (20%)/ For this assignment, students will craft a short think piece (5 pages), synthesizing the course readings and other content as a whole. They will pick one or two overarching themes, questions, or debates that they have identified throughout several of the readings. I would like for them to consider whether these broader course concepts will have any influence upon or added benefit for their own major, field or study, or career.
Original research-based essay (50%)/ For this essay students will need to write a 800 word interpretative essay that takes a found object, document or site —a postcard, a sound, a photograph etc.- to tell a story from an interdisciplinary perspective. Before submitting the final version of their essay, students will need to circulate drafts of their essay and be prepared to discuss and critique it in class. The essay needs to be research-based and accompanied by an appendix that documents the methodology and contains a short research bibliography. Depending on the theme the appendix should include further data or primary documents, such as illustrations or maps.

Preliminary Schedule, Readings and Assignments

The following is a very preliminary schedule. Readings and assignments will be adjusted depending on the familiarity of students with the topics and their pre-knowledge. In some of the sessions, readings will be divided up between different groups in the class (so that not everybody needs to read everything). Dates of field trips will be added at a later point. Typically, field trips will be scheduled on Fridays.

Week 1
What is wilderness? What is environmentalism?
And what is it all good for?
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, in W. Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90.
Richard White, “Are You Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?”, in W. Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground, W. W. Norton, 1996, 171-185.
https://faculty.washington.edu/stevehar/White.pdf

Week 2
What is Nature?
Christof Mauch, “Rachel Carson, Silent Spring,” in Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde (eds.), The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, 195-203.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm5bn.24

Christof Mauch, “Walt Disney World, Florida: At Least Two Natures”, in C. Mauch (ed.), Paradise Blues, Winwick: Whitehorse Press, 2024, 173-206.

Week 3
Nature Writing - Writing Nature: Environmental Ethics and Aesthetics
Aldo Leopold, “Thinking Like a Mountain”, in Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949, 129-133.
https://trainingcenter.fws.gov/resources/knowledge-resources/wildread/thinking-like-a-mountain.pdf
Timothy Clarke, “Thinking like a Mountain?”, in The Cambridge Introduction to Environment and Literature, New York/ Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, 77-86.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/FD47B4D7843ED7EB269035AB52B04BC2/9780511976261c7_p77-86_CBO.pdf/thinking-like-a-mountain.pdf

Alexa Weik von Mossner, “Le Déluge”, in Fragile: A Novel, Elzwhere Press 2023.

Week 4
The Anthropocene, the Death and the End of Nature
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, New York: Random House, 1989, 47-66.
Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The Anthropocene”, IGBT Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18.
http://people.whitman.edu/~frierspr/Crutzen%20and%20Stoermer%202000%20Anthropocene%20essay.pdf
Additional/ optional reading:
Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Anthropocene Earth System and Three Human Stories,” in Julia Adeney Thomas and Jan Zalasiewicz (eds.), Strata and Three Stories, Munich: RCC Perspectives: 2020, 41–67.
https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/2020_i3_thomas.pdf

Week 5
Climate Change and what to do about it
Hayal Desta, “The Slow Death of an Ethiopian Lake”, in Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, no. 3 (May 2023).
https://springs-rcc.org/slow-death-of-lake-ziway/

Nina Wormbs, “I still do a lot of good”, in Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, no.3 (May 2023)
https://springs-rcc.org/thinking-a-lot-of-good/

Mike Hulme, “Why we disagree about Climate Change”, in The Carbon Yearbook: The Annual Review of Business and Climate Change (2009): 41-43.
https://www.mikehulme.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Hulme-Carbon-Yearbook.pdf

Andreas Malm, “’To Halt Climate Change, We Need an Ecological Leninism’ – An Interview with Andreas Malm,” Jacobin Magazine, June 2020.
https://jacobin.com/2020/06/andreas-malm-coronavirus-covid-climate-change

Week 6
Environmental History - Environments in History
Watch: Donald Worster, “Environmental History”, produced by Marco Armiero, Johan Gärdebo, Santiago Gorostiza, Giacomo Bonan, Marta Pettersson, and Felipe Milanez, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, August 25, 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=BJfwVXWP6X4

Carolyn Merchant, “Gender and Environmental History”, in The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990): 1117-1121.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2936589

David Gentilcore, “The cistern-system of early modern Venice: technology, politics and culture in a hydraulic society”, in Water History (2021): 375-406.
https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/s12685-021-00288-2.pdf

Week 7
Maps and Mapping
“Venice Then and Now. 1600th Anniversary of the City”, NLR Online Exhibitions, https://expositions.nlr.ru/ve/RA4544/maps-of-venice
Talitta Reitz, “Back to the Drawing Board: Creative Mapping Methods for Inclusion and Connection”, in A. Franklin (ed.), Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021, 323-355.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-84248-2_11

Tania Rossetto, “'Mappy' Imageries of the Watery City: The cartographic figure of the Venice Lagoon across epochs and media,” in Shima 15, no. 1 (2021): 46-58.
https://www.shimajournal.org/issues/v15n1/05.-Rossetto-Shima-v15n1.pdf

Week 8
Walking as a Research Method
Nick Shepherd, “Walking as Embodied Research: Coloniality, Climate Change, and the ‘Arts of Noticing’”, in Science, Technology and Society 28 (2023): 58-67.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/09717218221102416

TIm Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, “Introduction”, in Ingold Vegunst (eds.), Ways of Walking: Etnography and Practice on Foot, Burlington VT: Ashgate 2008, 1-10.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315234250

Tania Rosetto, “’Mappy Imageries of the Watery City: The cartographic figure of the Venice Lagoon, across epochs and media, in Shima 15 (2021), 46-58.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d4f5/7cacd1d57547a5f66bc258a557e7849b7b6d.pdf

Week 9
Eating Environments
Camilla Bertolini et al., “Artisinal Fishing in the Venice Lagoon,” in Venice in the Anthropocene, Venice: wetlands, 2022, 101-108.
https://data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB253873881

Michael Pollan, “Naturally”, in The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/magazine/naturally.html
Rachel Kent, “Ethnobotany on the Table: Revolutionary Reimagination at Venice’s Tocia”, November 22, 2022, https://italysegreta.com/revolutionary-reimagination-at-venices-tocia/

Week 10
Biodiversity Loss and Extinction Stories
Ursula K. Heise, “Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Elegy and Comedy in Conservation Stories”, in Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2017, 19-54.
https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226358338-004

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, 2014, New York: Picador 2014, 4-22.
Tammana Begum, “What is Mass Extinction and Are We Facing a Sixth One?”, in Natural History Museum London, 19 May 2021, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html.
Ted Chiang, “The Great Silence”, in Exhalation, New York: Vintage 2019, 231-236
Cameron Muir, “Encountering Ghost Species”, in Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Magazine 1 (July 2022): 2-5.
https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/muir_encountering-ghost-species_springs_2022_1.pdf

Week 11
Ecocriticism, Music, Sound and Changing Environments
Serenella Iovino, “Cognitive Justice and the Truth of Biology: Death (and Life) in Venice”, in Ecocriticism in Italy, London/ New York: Bloomsbury 2016, 47-82.
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2017-0063

David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus, The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP 2001, 1-10.
https://books.google.ki/books?id=WuZ9zrla4cAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Garth Paine, “Listening to nature: How sound can help us understand environmental change”, in The Smithsonian Magazine, published December 28, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/using-sounds-wild-monitor-environmental-change-180971128/
Additional/ optional reading:
Peter A. Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise”, in Environmental History 10, no. 4 (2005): 636-65.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3986142

Week 12
The Agency of Non-Humans
Sarah Elton, “More-than-human”, in Patricia Ballamingie and David Szanto (eds.), Showing Theory to know Theory: Understanding Social Science Concepts Through Illustrative Vignettes, Ottawa: Showing Theory Press, 2022, 283-89.
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/showingtheory/chapter/more-than-human/

Melissa Howard, “More Than Human: Eben Kirksey and Multispecies Ethnography in the Era of COVID-19”, in Matters Journal April 15, 2020.
Timothy LeCain, “The Neo-Materialist Flip”, in Christof Mauch et al., Making Tracks: Human and Environmental History, Munich: RCC Perspectives, 2013, 93-96.
LeCain, Timothy J. “How Did Cows Construct the American Cowboy?”, in Maurits W. Ertsen, Christof Mauch, and Edmund Russell (eds.), Molding the Planet: Human Niche Construction at Work, RCC Perspectives: Munich, 2016, 17-24.

Bibliography

I am planning to provide students with readings (20-50 pages per week). The texts below can help with further reading.

Cristina Baldacci, “Re-Enacting Ecosystems: Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Environmental Storytelling in Virtual and Augmented Reality”, in Virtual and Augmented Reality. Piano B. Arti E Culture Visive 6, no. 1 (2021): 67–86. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2531-9876/14297.
Eleanor Barnett, “Food and Religious Identities in the Venetian Inquisition, ca. 1560–ca. 1640”, Renaissance Quarterly 74 (Spring 2021): 181-214.
Richard Page Beacham “The Digital Revolution and Modeling Time and Change in Historic Buildings and Cities: The Case of Visualizing Venice”, in Digital cities: Between history and archaeology / edited by Maurizio Forte and Helena Murteira, New York 2020
Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd edition, 2008).
Aldino Bondesan, “Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Evolution of the Lagoon of Venice”, in Mauro Soldati, Mauro Marchetti (eds.), Landscapes and Landforms of Italy, Cham: Springer, 2017.
Tilman Brück and Marco d’Errico, “Food Security and Violent Conflict,” in World Development 117 (May 2019): 145-149.
Rachel Carson, “Under Sea”, in The Marginal World, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.
Timothy Clark, “Environmental Justice and the Move ‘Beyond Nature Writing’”, in The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011, 87-95.
Ray Craib, “A Nationalist Metaphysics: State Fixations, National Maps, and the Geo-Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” in Hispanic American Historical Review (February 2002): 33-68.
Sule Emmanuel Egya, “The Poor Woods of Northern Nigeria”, in Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Magazine no.1 (May 2022): 1-8.
Joanne Marie Ferraro, Venice: History of the Floating City, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Alexandra Franklin, ed., Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship: Transformative Methods in Social Sustainability Research, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
George F. Grattan, “Climbing Back into the Tree: Art, Nature, and Theology in A River Runs Through It” in John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (eds.), Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, 231-242. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Harper and Row, 1980, 42-68, 301-303.
Gregg Mitman, “Where Ecology, Nature, and Politics Meet: Reclaiming The Death of Nature,” in Isis 97 (2006): 496-504.
Serenella Iovino, ed., “Introduction”, in Ecocriticism and Italy Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 1-12.
Listen, “Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Intelligence of Plants,” On Being with Krista Tippet, 20 August 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-ofplants/.
Watch, Neil Maher, “Seeing Nature: An Environmental Humanities Field Guide to Visual Culture,” Rachel Carson Center Lunchtime Colloquium on Thursday, July 11, 2019, on the RCC’s YouTube channel.
Raj Patel and Jason Moore, eds., “Cheap Nature”, in: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
Kristen Reynolds and Julian Agyeman, “Food Studies is Not as Frivolous as you Might Think,” Zocalo: Public Square, published, November 4, 2019, https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/food-studies-is-not-as-frivolous-as-you-might-think/.
Sally Spector, Venice and Food, Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 2006.
Jacob Smith, ed., “Green Discs,” in Eco-Sonic Media, Oakland: University of California Press, 2015, 13-41.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Penguin Books, 2007.
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (1851), in The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/
Rachel Mundy, “Birdsong and the Image of Evolution,” in Society & Animals 17 no. 3 (June 2009): 206-23.

Last updated: January 10, 2025