Initiatives: Environmental Humanities

programs supported by the center for the humanities

A multidisciplinary approach

Humanities scholars have much to contribute to our understandings of the environments around us. The Center for the Humanities supports cross-disciplinary collaborations that study the roots and impacts of environmental issues as well as those that engage with the cultures, politics and contexts that help shape how these environmental issues manifest. Efforts seek to respond to today’s environmental challenges not only by advancing environmental awareness but also by addressing environmental histories, arts and cultures through rigorous and interdisciplinary inquiry.

Digging in the archive

Tyson Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship

This fellowship, open to all undergraduate students in Arts & Sciences, is dedicated to developing projects related to topics in environmental humanities, using archival materials from WashU’s Tyson Research Center field station as a key source for their explorations. Students are immersed in an active, ongoing archival research project to uncover and interpret aspects of Tyson’s history. Students work collaboratively to process and interpret raw archival materials recently gathered from Tyson that document the site’s acquisition from the U.S. military by WashU in the 1960s, as well as maps and other records.

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Environmental Arts & Humanities Working Group

Supported by the Center for the Humanities as well as Arts & Sciences SPEED funding and Here + Next SPARK funding, the working group brings together leading environmental scholars across five disciplines and two schools. Members of the group include Bret Gustafson (professor of sociocultural anthropology, Arts & Sciences), Derek Hoeferlin (associate professor and chair of landscape architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts), Diana Montaño (associate professor of history, Arts & Sciences), Patricia Olynyk (Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts) and Ila Sheren (associate professor of art history and archaeology, Arts & Sciences). The working group is hosting an exhibit, Extractivism in the Americas, at Des Lee Gallery in spring 2025 showcasing the work of WashU environmental humanities scholars and artists alongside community members. The exhibit will focus on communities directly impacted by oil and mining, an extractive process that has become an important nexus of research across WashU and the St. Louis region as well as globally.

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Events

The humanities center invites visiting scholars and practitioners to discuss their work in the environmental humanities and engage with the WashU humanities community. Past speakers include Michael Pollan and Jason Finch. 

In February 2024, the Center for the Humanities invited Nicole Seymour, professor of English, California State University, Fullerton, as the keynote lecturer for the annual Faculty Book Celebration. Seymour’s work considers how literature and other cultural forms — from documentary film to standup comedy — mediate our relationship to environmental crisis. Her lecture, based on her recent book Glitter (Bloomsbury), offered an environmental-cultural history of the substance, charting how glitter has served as a rallying symbol for the marginalized: the working class, people of color and queer communities. The following day, Seymour led a two-hour writing workshop for graduate students, “From Climate Anxiety to Climate Action,” in which she guided participants in considering how and where they can take action, how to identify local resources and opportunities for meaningful impact and how to use writing to build collectives around the issue of climate change.

VIEW THE KEYNOTE LECTURE

RDE Artistic Research

A new perspective on site-specific work 

The Center for the Humanities and Tyson Research Center, Washington University’s environmental field station, hosted humanities graduate students in spring 2024 for a semester-long inquiry into the field of artistic research within the context of the environmental humanities. The 2,000-acre wooded landscape has a rich and varied history of human activity, which the graduate students drew on to conduct explorations of the site on topics such as histories of war, interspecies humanities and the intersection of art and environmental activism. 

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Graduate student participants in RDE Artistic Research

Additional resources