Environmental Humanities: The City and its Others

The “Environmental Humanities” cluster broadly draws on a topic of vital importance and of great interest to many of our majors. We have generated the more specific focus of “the city and its others” in recognition of several current undergraduate courses and ongoing faculty research projects that are overtly or nascently organized around problems of rural, urban, and ex-/suburban life and the environment, including the peripheral or sacrifice zones that are not usually conceived of as part of the metropolis, but are in many ways its drivers.

We aim to synthesize these existing departmental strengths in new ways to support innovative critical and critical-creative research by undergraduate students on topics that may range from conceptions of land-, sky-, and seascape to environmental justice to plantation economies, just to name a few of the possibilities. We do so in part by animating our own urban locale in Chicago as a laboratory for critical thought—both about our general environmental conditions and about the mutual implication of city, country, suburb, sacrifice zone, and all the varied forms of hinterlands here and beyond.

Among our core faculty, Jennifer Scappettone will continue to spearhead the cluster in the coming years, which represents an extension of her previous and ongoing scholarly/creative work in research projects (including a published poetry collection on the varied “discharges” of a suburban, corporate landfill and a monograph on Venice as a linked topography and cultural heritage that has seemed literally fluidly antithetical to Modernist literary values) and recent courses (including “Sensing the Anthropocene” and “Breathing Matters: Poetics and Politics of Air” in addition to the two undergraduate courses listed below). Benjamin Morgan has also agreed to continue as a primary collaborator. He is now completing a monograph entitled In Human Scale: The Aesthetics of Climate Change and teaching a PhD-level “Introduction to the Environmental Humanities” course; and he has also been a leading participant in interdisciplinary conversations about climate change around campus. We will also involve other departmental faculty whose research and writing variously foregrounds these issues, particularly including our Creative Writing colleague Stephanie Soileau and our Literature colleague Riley Snorton. Soileau’s fiction writing examines Louisiana (in her words) “as a place emblematic of global environmental change and decay, of the ambivalent relationship between the oil industry and the people whose land gives up the oil, of ‘solastalgia,’ a neologism for the psychic ache that comes from living in a home-place that has undergone an irreversible transformation.” Snorton’s recent work extends to racial ecologies, particularly the marginal spaces like swamplands and the marginal subjects, communities and practices that emerge through marronage (or the process—literal and figurative—of escape from enslavement).

This project plans to continue developing the project webpage, expanding its partnership with the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), publishing The Peregrine, and (more broadly) creating a larger research and practice community around Environmental Humanities and environmental justice that moves beyond the English Department and the classroom through such events as field trips (partnering with Chicago Studies or with Ecology & Evolution or CEGU), meetings with local activist organizations, or other sorts of informal gatherings.

They will also be invited to collaborate with fellow students on research projects that bridge the separate approaches of distinct courses. Both our internship awardees and other interested students will be further supported in these efforts by our departmental Writing and Research Advisers (Nell Pach and Sylvie Boulette) in conceiving and developing projects both short and long term, collective and individual.