A critical challenge for the twenty-first century is to address urgent environmental concerns in ways that can bring about social and institutional change. The Environmental Humanities (EH) Initiative at Colby encompasses a broad range of programs in many fields that attempt to explore the most basic frameworks, narratives, assumptions, and principles humans employ to defend, justify, legitimate, and normalize their relations with nonhuman nature. The EH Initiative includes such programs as the Colby Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities, a wide variety of EH courses and annual course development grants, an annual Distinguished Fellow, a Faculty Seminar, a Student Advisory Board, and the EH Literary and Art Magazine FAUNA.
With the participation of faculty across the college, the Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab (PHIL) at Colby critically explores the relationship between human and non-human animals. Whether as companions, labor, food, pests, or indifferent sharers of ecosystems, animals are with us constantly, shaping our material and imaginative lives, as we influence theirs. Engaging with a rich interdisciplinary animal studies conversation in the humanities, the 2024-2027 PHIL brings together Colby faculty, students, and publics in Maine and elsewhere to think with animals about our intertwined histories and futures. The Principal Investigators of the PHIL are Daniel Harkett, Associate Professor of Art, and Laura Nüffer, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies.
The New England Humanities Consortium (NEHC) promotes and strengthens intellectual collaboration, interdisciplinary exchange, and innovative educational, intercultural, and curricular programming among New England Humanities centers and institutes, and the faculty, students, and regional, national, and global communities they serve. The NEHC includes: Amherst College, Brown University, Colby College, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, Northeastern University, Smith College, Tufts University, the University of Connecticut, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Vermont, Wellesley College, and Wheaton College. The programming and activities of the NEHC are made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the participating institutions. Colby is the executive and administrative hub of the NEHC as of Fall 2021.
As part of our commitment to developing greater faculty expertise in environmental humanities, particularly in the employment of digital humanities methods and tools, the Center offers summer grants to faculty enabling those interested in the environmental digital humanities to attend conferences and workshops to build their skills.
The Critical Race Collaborative works to build a mutually supportive, intellectually stimulating network between scholars working on race and identity at Colby. Scholars in the Humanities approach their subject from a host of different disciplines, often through different languages, concentrating on very different communities, and engaging with time periods that stretch from antiquity to the present. As a result, such scholars can feel very much alone. This initiative strengthens research and builds a networked community that can act to stimulate, provoke, and encourage new ideas.