The Yale Environmental Humanities Initiative is pleased to announce that the third Annual Graduate Symposium on the Environmental Humanities will be held at Henry R. Luce Hall, in room 203, from 10:30am-3:45pm.
Conference Overview
This event will bring together the Yale and New Haven-area community working on the environmental humanities. The symposium’s goals are to showcase scholarship in progress, foster exchange between students, faculty, and others working across diverse fields, and explore the unifying questions and problems in the study of the environmental humanities.
The environmental humanities constitute a wide-ranging interdisciplinary field that brings together the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Its goal is to integrate conversations in a variety of subfields including, but not limited to, environmental history, cultural geography, political ecology, science and technology studies, ecocriticism, and environmental anthropology. Ultimately, scholars in the environmental humanities hope to reshape how we consider the environment and our place in it.
This year, this interdisciplinary conference is proud to present scholars of architecture, history of art, languages and literatures, anthropology, religion, and environmental studies among other fields.
For abstracts of this year’s presentations, click here.
Conference Schedule
10:30 – 10:40 | Opening Remarks by Lav Kanoi
10:40 – 12:00 | Panel I: Religion and Representation
moderated by Mary Evelyn Tucker, F&ES + Divinity
– Allegra Lovejoy Wiprud, F&ES, Personhood of Trees in Hindu Practice and Philosophy
– Annalea Rose Thiessen, Divinity, Iconic-Seeing: Shifting the Human Relation to the Earth
– Elena Adasheva-Klein, Anthropology, Humans Are Not Welcome? Blizzards, Adventures, and Death on Wrangel Island
– Ted Hamilton, Comparative Literature, Communicating Vessels: Mario Vargas Llosa and the Cultural Difference of Nature
12:00 – 12:45 | Lunch
12:45 – 2:00 | Panel II: Art & Landscape
moderated by Jennifer Raab, History of Art
– Freya Schwachenwald, History of Art, Ecology, Slavery and Ice Cream. Haunting and Knowing in Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s archive
– Jack Hanly, Architecture, Peter Fend, Ocean Earth, and the Artist-Technician
– Anna Thurston, Divinity, Mountains as Markers: British Aesthetic Engagement with 19th Century Himalayan Landscapes
– Andrew Vielkind, History of Art, Demystified Terrains: The Moonscape as Environmental ‘Non-Site’
2:00 – 2:15 | Tea
2:15 – 3:30 | Panel III: Science and Society
moderated by Deborah Coen, History
– Cheng Li, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Planting Socialist Nature: The Rhetoric of Tree-planting in Socialist China, 1949-1961
– Tanmoy Sharma, Anthropology, Oil India Unlimited: Corporations and Collectivities on the margins of India
– Jia Weng, Architecture, Domesticating the Clouds: Weather Modification and the Aesthetic of Scale
– Antonio Ballesteros-Figueroa, F&ES, Framing imperfect worlds: An STS approach to the construction of environmental knowledge
3:30 – 3:45 | Closing Remarks by Abigail Fields