Courses

COURSES FOR CREDIT TOWARDS DESIGNATED EMPHASIS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES, 2024-2025

Fall 2024

ENL 252: "Hydrographic Victorians: Waterscapes of Nineteenth Century Literature," Liz Miller

“The sea is calm tonight” – so begins Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” one of the best-known poems of the Victorian period. Britain is an island and a notoriously wet country, and its Victorian empire touched every ocean in the world; this class will look closely at the coastlines, docksides, and bodies of water that serve so often in its literature as settings, imagery, symbols, and objects of inquiry in their own right. We will read literature set in freshwater and saltwater geographies and in the places they meet, like the famous estuary of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and we will study scholarship from such watery subfields as hydrocriticism, blue humanities, critical ocean studies, coastal studies, and Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean studies. We will situate our readings in a robust cultural context including key Victorian artists of the sea such as J.M.W. Turner. Through such materials, our class will approach a series of critical questions: How is water implicated in imperial, capitalist, and national structures, and how is it, at times, resistant to them? How are bodies of water understood to connect different places and how are they understood to separate them? How did literature and art shape Victorians’ hydro-imagination? What role did the era’s major advances in drainage, river engineering, and steam carriage play in emerging ideas of industrial modernity? In addition to reading a wide range of Victorian literature that touches on these questions, we will also read some texts from earlier in the nineteenth century and perhaps some published later that look back on the Victorian hydroimaginary.

Winter 2025

HIS 202H: "Themes in 19th-century US History," Rachel St. John

Thursdays, 3:10pm-6pm - Social Science & Humanities 4202

This reading intensive course will provide an introduction to the wide range of scholarship on the history of the 19th-century United States, including environmental history. Designed to provide students with a foundation for teaching, researching, and writing about U.S. history, the course is organized both chronologically and thematically. Some course themes include: environment and health; slavery and emancipation; labor and economic inequality; capitalism; race and ethnicity; gender and kinship; Indigenous power and sovereignty; Civil War and Reconstruction; violence; expansion and empire; and power and politics. The coverage, although extensive, is also necessarily selective. I have selected the readings to acquaint you with some of the main themes and historiographical debates of the field and to provide a variety of approaches, methodologies, and interpretations. Course readings will combine recent scholarship with works of long-standing significance with an emphasis on understanding both historical developments and historiographic debates. (Note: If you are taking this course for elective credit towards the DE in Environmental Humanities, you must focus your final paper on some question related to environmental history.)

Spring 2025

EVH 200: "Introduction to the Environmental Humanities," Hsuan Hsu

EVH200 is the core seminar for graduate students from various disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and beyond with an interest in pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Environmental Humanities. In this course we will discuss key issues, concepts, questions, and debates in the environmental humanities through discussions of classic and contemporary readings in the main disciplines that have contributed to Environmental Humanities scholarship.

LDA 215: "Ecologies of Infrastructure," Brett Milligan

Introduction to interdisciplinary scholarship and design on expanding conceptions of infrastructure, that include social, technical, ecological, political and aesthetic dimensions of the medium. Focus on application of theory to case studies and thinking through landscape as infrastructure.

SPA 230: "On Fire and Under Water: Migration in the Anthropocene," Emily Celeste Vazquez Enriquez

Focusing on contemporary Latin American literature and film, this seminar examines the intersections of migration, climate change, natural disasters, and cultural representation in the context of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of ecological disruption—ranging from wildfires to flooding and drought—we will analyze how these phenomena impact human and nonhuman migration. Race relations will be a central factor in our discussions, as we examine how environmental degradation disproportionately affects marginalized communities. Students will investigate themes of displacement and ecological violence, considering how environmental factors shape experiences of migration in the communities of origin and destination.

Future courses

Fall 2025: LDA 216: "Food & the City," Claire Napawan

Spring 2026: LDA 201: "Landscape Architecture & Environmental Design Theory," Brett Milligan

Fall 2023

CRD 251: "ECOLOGY AND SOCIETY," Clare Cannon

Class meets Tuesdays – Thursdays, 12:10-2 pm in Olson 150. The course examines the intersections of environmental Justice and other critical theories, such as Black Feminist Thought, in the context of climate change, social inequality, and disasters. Past syllabi can be found at https://clarecannon.ucdavis.edu.

LDA 205/GEO 233: "URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN," Stephen Wheeler

Regulation, design, and development of the built landscape, planning and land development processes, zoning and subdivision regulation, site planning, urban design goals and methods, public participation strategies, creatively designing landscapes to meet community and ecological goals.

SOC295: "ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY: ENVIRONMENT, RISK, GOVERNANCE," Tom Beamish

What is the environment? What is at risk? What is governance? The environment is admittedly a contested idea, but as conventionally invoked is often meant to convey the material aspects of the world around us, which is considered solid, physical, and factual compared to the ideal world of human thought, mind, and god(s). While risk has more than one meaning, in the social and behavioral sciences, it is typically invoked to capture a situation in which something of collective worth, such as human life, property, or cherished values, is perceived as “at stake” and its future status uncertain. Finally, governance conveys the actions, manner, and executive power that underlay institutions like government and other forms of social power—economy, gender, religion, etc.—that structure social life. Therefore, governance involves both the formal aspects of governing and the informal social and political expectations that accompany their application. The interrelation between these three concepts—environment, risk, governance—will be our guiding lights for the quarter. In simple terms, we will seek answers to the following questions related to them, among many others! Why is our way of life degrading the environment so catastrophically, putting us all at great risk? What do we mean when we suggest we can “manage the environment,” “manage risks,” or “engage in good environmental (or risk) governance?” Why is the risk of environmental disorganization so inequitably distributed and so difficult to resolve? And what must our governance systems do to address these endemic environmental issues and risks?

ENL 237, "A SEMINAR FOR WRITERS: ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING ACROSS GENRES," Margaret Ronda

HIS 201X: "US COLONIALISM IN PUERTO RICO: LEGAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND SOCIAL HISTORIES FROM THE US OCCUPATION TO THE CALL FOR REPARATIONS," Jose Juan Perez Melendez

This seminar will examine the intricate manifestations and muti-form impacts of US colonialism in Puerto Rico from 1898 to the present. Although it was once part of the Spanish monarchy and has been under US jurisdiction for 125 years, this insular territory often falls into a disciplinary limbo, proscribed from their fields by historians of the US and of Latin America alike for largely ideological and misguided reasons. Yet, as the readings and discussions in this seminar will reveal, Puerto Rico is a critical touchstone that interrogates disciplinary boundaries: as a laboratory for modernization, it became an exemplar of progress for the rest of Latin America; and as the poorest US jurisdiction in the present day, it serves as a cautionary tale against colonial dependence, and the ravages of finance and disaster capitalism.

The seminar will cover the social, political and environmental trajectory of the archipelago of Puerto Rico as one of several unincorporated territories defined by US Supreme Court Justice Edward White as “foreign in a domestic sense.” The seminar will begin with an overview of Puerto Rico in the nineteenth-century under Spanish dominion, before moving to the aftermath of US occupation by looking at land distribution changes, the natural disasters that consolidated US dominion, and the exceptional and unprecedented definitions of Puerto Rico and other newly acquired territories crafted by the “insular cases” of 1901-1922. Readings and research exercises will cover the emergence of regional planning in a colonial context and its relationship to the man-made impact of natural disasters; Malthusian-like reproductive and migratory policies developed in the 1940s-60s; and the social and environmental impacts of subsidized oil, pharmaceutical, and transgenic-crop industries since the 1970s. The seminar will feature guest presentations from authors covered in the readings, and will also address contemporary crises including the environmental ravages curtailing agricultural self-sustenance, the relationship between natural disasters and colonial subjugation, and the federal imposition of an extraconstitutional financial oversight board over local government in the midst of the island’s economic collapse. Ultimately, the seminar will explore new pathways for interpreting the Puerto Rican question and articulate possibilities for decolonial reparations.

Winter 2024

EVH 200: "INTRODUCTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES," Liz Miller (English) and Suzana Sawyer (Anthropology)

[Thursday, 12:10-3pm]

MUS 221: "ECOMUSICOLOGY/MUSIC AND NATURE," Beth Levy

[Monday, 1:10-4pm]

This course will explore changing conceptions of music and nature from the 18th to the 21st centuries. How and why have composers attempted to depict or reflect the natural world in their works? What happens when musicians around the world conceive their relationships to the environment? What is the relationship between natural sounds and musical ones? What role can musicians play in increasing environmental awareness at a time of crisis? Students may select from any genre or time period for their own individual projects, which will be shared with the class at several stages, culminating in final presentations during the last week of the quarter

SPA 279: "Bodies of Extraction," Emily Celeste Vasquez Enriquez

[Thursday, 4:10-7pm]

What does it mean to be human? Drawing on the fields of the environmental humanities, disability studies, indigenous studies, animal studies, crip theories, and posthumanism, this course examines cultural representations and lived experiences of the intimate and complex relationships between bodies, environments, and extractive systems. Central to our discussions will be the study of 20th and 21st century Latin American literary and artistic productions that portray some of the most recurrent ways in which human and nonhuman beings are affected by anthropocentric formulations. We will analyze the different systems of exclusion that are not only sustained but many times produced by mainstream definitions of the human. Because of it, we will attend to the legal, ethical, and affective dimensions of the most commonly accepted ontological categories. In our discussions we will rethink the boundaries established by the human/nonhuman binary. We will pay special attention to the gendered, ableist, and racial dynamics produced within the human-centered frames of extractive practices.

Spring, 2024

ANT 210: Marisol De La Cadena

Description: TBA.

ENL 287: "Climate Ideologies," Akua Banful

This course examines the cultural and ideological dimensions of ‘climate’ through the literary and cultural productions of nineteenth and twentieth-century tropical societies during and after empire. Our explorations will make landfall in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, interrogating how ideologies of racial capital, socialism, and countercultural aesthetic rebellions mobilize ideas of climate and the environment in the process of worldmaking.

LDA 201: "THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE DESIGNED ENVIRONMENT," Brett Milligan

Examines the major theories of environmental design. Epistemology of design serves as framework to examine modern landscape architecture, architecture, urban design and planning. Normative theories of design are reviewed along with the social and environmental sciences.