Clark—whose social and natural sciences faculty have long been celebrated for their research in climate change, sustainability, and conservation—has a renewed focus on the environmental humanities. English Professor Stephen Levin and his colleagues are part of this field of research that first took off after the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 1992.
Launching new courses in environmental humanities
“The realization of planetary crisis, and a shared sense of precarity, is what has made the current version of environmental humanities exceedingly important,” Levin says. Now he and his colleagues are expanding their research and coursework in the interdisciplinary field, thanks to support from Clark’s Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities and A New Earth Conversation, a university-wide climate initiative.
The Higgins Institute for the Arts and Humanities and A New Earth Conversation, a university-wide climate initiative, named four faculty fellows in the environmental humanities to develop and teach courses in the environmental humanities. They include Levin and Geography Professor Max Ritts, teaching Ecologies and Energies; Francophone Studies and Language, Literature, and Culture Professor Odile Ferly, Decolonial Ecologies in the Caribbean; and History Professor Nana Kesse, African Environmental History.
“Literature and film have much more potential to make people react to what is happening and make a change, instead of simply hearing about those issues from scientists and politicians,” Ferly insists. “The humanities engage with the imagination, which is important for thinking about the future.”