“The Environmental Humanities: Methods, Challenges, Debates”

Conveners

• Paul Buchholz, Assistant Professor, Department of German Studies
• Caroline Schaumann,  Associate Professor, Department of German Studies

The Center for Faculty Development and Excellence announces an Academic Learning Community for the spring 2017 semester on the Environmental Humanities. This Academic Learning Community seeks to build a network of scholars and foster an ongoing dialogue on the environmental humanities and its challenges.  We believe that the humanities have a crucial task in articulating and communicating environmental concerns to a contemporary public and that it is equally important to carefully look at depictions of local, global, and planetary environments in both past and present texts of all kinds in order to fully understand the narrative modes of current crises and evaluate their rhetoric and effectiveness.  Specific topics will include the Local, the Global, and the Planetary; Postmodernism and Material Ecocriticism; Crisis and Catastrophe; and Animal Studies.
 
Academic Learning Communities are informal seminars that are intended to

• engage faculty in collaborative explorations of innovative research and teaching topics;
• bring guest speakers to campus to enhance the curriculum and learning; and/or
• help disseminate important research discoveries and innovative learning strategies to the broader community.

Learn more information on our past academic learning communities

Particulars

• The Seminar will meet 4 times on during the spring 2017 semester, as follows: February 3, February 24, March 24, and April 21. Each meeting will be held from 4:00-5:30pm in 330 Modern Language Building with light refreshments provided.
• Participants will be asked to develop individual as well as collective deliverables that they expect to bring to fruition as a result of participation in the community.
• Each meeting will balance presentations by the facilitator or invited speakers with group discussions of pertinent readings and presentations by seminar participants.
• Suggested readings will be posted on Canvas prior to the session, and/or will be made available separately.
• Some of the meetings will coincide with visits to Emory by invited speakers who are experts on the theme. These will be announced at a later date.
• Up to 20 participants will be accommodated and will include both faculty and graduate students from across the university.

Selections will be announced in mid-January. A limited number of spaces will be reserved for graduate students based on the relevance of their research to the topic.