September 17, 2025
On Thursday, September 11th, Yale Environmental Humanities held a welcome back panel and reception to usher in a new academic year of environmental humanities events and academic pursuits. The three featured speakers—Moeko Fujii, David Gissen, and Manoel Rendeiro Neto—gave fascinating talks about some of the different perspectives on the environmental humanities they’ve developed through their research.
Moeko Fujii, an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, and a contributing writer for Orion Magazine (read her articles here), primarily studies 20th-century American film and film noir. She described the agency that nature in the background scenes of movies possesses, describing how the environment in film is simultaneously “invisible and hyper-visible.” To Fujii, environments become a set of visions, seen both by the film’s characters and the film’s viewer. It’s “something to be witnessed by others but never fully owned.” In this way, films control what elements of the environment to include in the background, but nature never loses its agency.
David Gissen is the Class of 1972 Professor of Architecture and Director of the Architecture PhD Program. In his most recent book, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), he explores how the green architecture movement created a narrow view of the built environment by focusing only on the “clean” and “strong” features of nature. His talk explained how mud and dirt became sub-natural and how architecture rejected infirmity and incapacity within nature. Gissen argued instead for building “swampiness and viscousness” back into urban spaces designed to be dry, and called for architects to uphold weakness as a quality to value.
Manoel Rendeiro Neto is a Postdoctoral Associate in History and an Affiliate Fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies, who will join Yale as an Assistant Professor of Latin American History in Fall 2026. His presentation, “Channeling Enslaved Backwaters: Waterscape Interventions Across Amazonian-Guianese Borderlands,” focused on the colonies that are now modern-day Suriname and northern Brazil and colonial interactions between enslaved peoples and water systems.
Rendeiro Neto’s research describes the wetlands that European powers found as they attempted to set up plantations in the region and the water-management systems that they engineered to turn the wetlands into agricultural land. Waterscape engineering facilitated the use of enslaved labor on plantations, and colonizers forced enslaved people to build the drainage works that created the conditions for their later forced agricultural labor.
Thank you to Moeko Fujii, David Gissen, and Manoel Rendeiro Neto for their engaging and informative talks as part of the Environmental Humanities welcome back panel, and thank you to everyone who joined us at the event!