Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professorship in Environmental Studies
BA, Clark University. MArch, University of Oregon. JD, Northeastern University. Areas of specialization: landscape studies, environmental arts and humanities, political ecology, and environmental justice. Recent research focuses on urban and post-industrial landscapes of the anthropocene and visions for future interventions in a time of climate change. Field research on an ancient market garden in Istanbul; migrant families’ kitchen gardens in Kathmandu, and landscapes in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Earlier research on fishing and agrarian communities of Sulawesi, Indonesia, community-based reef management in Maluku Islands; groundwater salinization in west Java; indigenous communities and logging concessions, Kalimantan. Former program director, the Rainforest Alliance. Contributing author and editor, People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation (Columbia University Press 2000) and Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia (Duke University Press 2003). Co-editor of Representing Communities: Politics and Histories of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (2005) and Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (AltaMira Press, 2005). Recent chapters and articles include “Insurgent Ecologies: Rhetorics of Resistance and Affirmation in Yedikule, Istanbul’s Ancient Market Garden” (2020), “The Garden of Dreams: Weedy Landscapes in Kathmandu,” (2016), “Landscapes in Translation: Traveling the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel with Raja Shehadeh and David Grossman” (2014), and “Honey in the City, Just Food’s Campaign for Legalizing Beekeeping in New York City” (2012). Director, Intersections Colloquium Series: Border Zones in Environmental Studies. Residencies at University of California–Irvine, Humanities Research Institute, and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Recipient of Fulbright-Hays fellowship for fieldwork in Indonesia, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Science Research Council. SLC, 2000–
Previous Courses
Environmental Studies
Environmental Humanities: An Introduction
Intermediate, Seminar—Spring
The environmental humanities are an emerging assemblage of disciplinary perspectives that draw the humanities disciplines into conversation with the natural and social sciences. In this course, fiction and non-fiction writing, history, and film will be drawn on to investigate contemporary understandings of an epoch controversially called “the Anthropocene.” What do perspectives, methods, insights and values of the arts and humanities, as well as the natural sciences, bring to our perceptions of specific environments and the global environmental emergency that is the signature of this moment in planetary history? How do the environmental humanities and social sciences inform visions, affect, and social perceptions of environmental issues? How do interventions in the arts and humanities constitute acts of “world-making”: new ways of seeing, feeling, and imagining human and other-than-human ways of caring for this planet in this long moment of danger? We will read fiction and non-fiction as well as works by anthropologists, lichenologists, historians, literary scholars, science fiction and non-fiction writers, and explorers of seas, caves and mines.
Faculty
Charles Zerner
The Environmental Imagination: Perspectives From the Social Sciences, Environmental Humanities, and the Arts
Open, Seminar—Fall
“Climate change” covers a variety of hydrological, thermal, geological, and atmospheric crises that are intersecting and accelerating in scope and intensity. Inspired by Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwOvBv8RLmo) performing her poem Earthrise, this course invites a conversation that draws together the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts: a journey through the global climate crisis on a variety of scales, in specific contexts, and through diverse media. Fiction and nonfiction writing, history, and film will be drawn upon to investigate understandings of an epoch controversially called “the Anthropocene.” What do these different perspectives, methods, and insights bring to our perceptions of specific environments? How do different rhetorical formations, imaginaries, narratives, and visual images inform cognitive and affective responses to the Anthropocene? What do they bring to our understanding of the global environmental emergency that is the signature of this moment in planetary history? How do interventions in the arts and humanities constitute acts of “world-making”—new ways of seeing, feeling, and imagining human ways of caring for this planet? In conjunction with the literatures of political ecology and cultural anthropology, we will read fiction by authors such as Amitav Ghosh and Stanislas Lem; nonfiction by Robert MacFarlane (Underlands), Ben Ehrenreich (Desert Notebooks), Joseph Masco (irradiated landscapes in the American West), Kate Brown (Plutopia), and Madeleine Watts (The Inland Sea).
Faculty
Charles Zerner