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Emeritus faculty member Charles Zerner (Environmental Studies) spent the spring 2023 semester as a visiting professor at the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University in Denmark. Zerner, who held the Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professorship in Environmental Studies during his 22-year tenure at Sarah Lawrence, retired in May of 2022.
Over the course of three months at the Centre, Zerner led a workshop on environmental writing and shared insights into his own research, which stems from a decades long project: “I was able to pursue my project of writing stories based on environmental ethnographic research I had undertaken three decades ago in South Sulawesi, Indonesia,” he says. “In this project, I explore how fishermen sailing the Makassar Strait imagined a distinctive vision of what we call the natural world, and I ask if this vision offers insights or conceptual tools for a hyper-industrialized world in which humanity, oceans, and their inhabitants are at risk.”
Upon his return, Zerner reflected on how this latest chapter in his esteemed academic career relates to the many years he spent at SLC. “My work at Aarhus built directly on my teaching at Sarah Lawrence, where the superb faculty nurtured my interdisciplinary interests, including in the ways story-telling informs public as well as scholarly discourse. At Sarah Lawrence, I was grateful for the intellectual freedom to use methods of literary analysis, for example, to tackle questions about scientific description, and to develop courses on topics such as environmental poetics and politics, and how our imaginings and descriptions of the world shape possibilities for the future.”