Courses - 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