Yale Environmental Humanities is excited to welcome back students, faculty and other affiliates with a panel discussion centered on the concept of “landscape” on September 10, 2021 at 4pm . This year’s programming will probe the idea and the reality of landscape as it is used by artists, writers, theorists, even politicians to tell us something—and, importantly, to make us believe something—about our lives and ourselves. At the panel, Yale faculty members will present briefly on their work, as it relates to land, waters, and other built or natural environments, and human interactions with them.
Attend virtually by registering here.
Below are biographies of our featured panelists:
Jonathan Howard (English, African American Studies)
Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies here at Yale. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His current book project, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diaspora literature. Professor Howard has received fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Souls, and Atlantic Studies.
Gerald Torres is Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment and Professor of Law at the Yale Law School. Before coming to Yale, he was the Jane M.G. Foster professor at Cornell Law School. Professor Torres served as counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice and helped establish the Office of Tribal Justice and helped draft the Executive Order on Environmental Justice (EO 12898). He has also served on the board of the Environmental Law Institute and the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He is the founding chairman of the Advancement Project, a leading civil rights advocacy organization in the United States. As a pioneer in the field of environmental law, Professor Torres has spent his career examining the intrinsic connections between the environment, agricultural and food systems, and social justice.
Jane Tylus (Italian, Comparative Literature)
Jane Tylus is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature. She is interested in the recovery and interrogation of lost and marginalized voices –historical personages, dialects and minor genres such as the pastoral. She previously taught at NYU in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, where she was founding faculty director of the Humanities Initiative. Her books include Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (1993, Stanford); Sacred Narratives: The Poems of Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici (2001, Chicago), for which she won the Translation Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women; Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others (2009, Chicago), which won Howard Marraro Prize for Outstanding Work in Italian Studies, MLA; and, Siena, City of Secrets (2015, Chicago). Her current book project explores the ritual of departure in early modernity.