Winifred Tate
Toxicity is ubiquitous but elusive, a defining feature of contemporary life. In this course, we will examine how toxicity as an analytic can illuminate the materialities of social difference, the politics of evidence, the nature of health, and the nature of nature. Much of contemporary toxicity results from attempts to improve human lives, with often devastating impacts on human and non-human. We will examine how toxicity is differentially distributed, and how it is debated and represented with a particular focus on visual forms. We conclude examining efforts to engineer human capacities and health through pharmaceutical intervention
Andrew Marshall
Agriculture is a fundamental way in which humans interact with their environment and is at the nexus of ecological, social, and economic systems. An introduction to the ecological bases, practicalities, and philosophies of food and agricultural systems. Provides a foundation in such concepts as agroecology, sustainable soil management, pest and weed control, and organic farming. Also considers social, economic, and public-policy issues. Field trips to local farms and other agricultural institutions. Cannot be counted toward the biology major.
Kim Besio
An examination of cultural and political aspects of land and other resource use, using the lens of political ecology and, a variety of ethnographic examples in different parts of the world. Case studies focus on ongoing conflicts over contested resources and related efforts to challenge experiences of environmental and food injustices. Students will apply conceptual tools from political ecology and environmental anthropology to develop a research project on a relevant topic of their choosing. Prerequisite: Anthropology 112.
Chris Walker
What can literature teach us about nature and environmental justice? Do the humanities and environmental studies share a vision of a sustainable future? Is it possible to understand climate change without telling stories about its uneven global impacts? To address these and other questions, we will examine how the environmental humanities implicitly respond to the “two cultures” debate. We will then investigate the relationship between environmental justice and western societies’ extractive logics, economies, and management of nature. From within this theoretical framework we will analyze novels, poetry, and environmental films.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
Can media play an important role in addressing the climate crisis? Are some kinds of narratives more effective than others? We will answer these and related questions by considering select examples from different mediums (from film to literature) and situating them within scholarship from both the humanities (ecocriticism) and the social sciences (environmental communication). For their final project, students will be asked to create a work of art, craft a detailed research design for an empirical study, or write a public-facing ecocritique of a contemporary text.
Katherine Stubbs
How did early American representations of the natural world serve to challenge the assumed order of things–conventional assumptions about hierarchy and identity, about the proper organization of society and sexual relations? And how did the unruly strangeness of the non-human natural world in turn resist being reduce to a simple instrument of rhetoric, a discursive staging ground for personal, social, and political transformation? Writers include Wheatley Peters, Brockden Brown, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Fuller and Whitman. Fulfills English D and LE requirements.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
In this moment of climate emergency, it is imperative to develop alternatives to fossil-fueled liberal capitalism. This course explores visions of positive environmental futures that can inspire imaginations and movements by examining how various thinkers and communities have depicted better, more sustainable, and more just worlds. With a diverse range of texts, we pair literature, language, film, video, architecture, and manifestos with critical scholarship from relevant fields. Fulfills English C, D, and LE requirements. Prerequisite: Any W1 course.
Elizabeth Sagasar
Explores English literature written during the scientific revolution, including Shakespeare’s King Lear, poems and prose by 17th-c. women, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. How do these texts imagine the natural world and the human within it? How do they propose or challenge boundaries between human and non-human animals? How do attitudes toward the environment emerge, change and persist in literary history and more broadly in the history of ideas? We seek answers through lively reading strategies, creative exercises, and research both online and in Special Collections archives.
Gail Carlson
Explores the history, theory, and practice of environmental activism in the U.S. and around the world, largely through primary source narratives and case studies from individual activists, grassroots groups, indigenous people, and large environmental organizations. Motivations, strategies and outcomes of a variety of environmental campaigns will be explored, along with how experiences vary by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and indigeneity. Students will learn effective oral and written communications in a variety of forms, along with collaborative activism skills, which they will have an opportunity to put into practice.
Atal Ahmadzai
Environmental issues are often intractable problems with intertwined ecological, political, and economic aspects. At the root of these complex problems are power dynamics emerging from efforts to dominate nature and subjugate people. This course examines the historical, contemporary, and systematic inequalities and injustices related to environmental issues through power relations. By employing critical analytical frameworks, this course examines underlying power dynamics providing students with a deeper understanding of the drivers and consequences of ecological problems and the policies enacted to solve them.
Sanval Nasim
The objective is to develop and apply economic tools to current environmental and resource-management issues. Causes of and remedies to environmental and resource-management problems are analyzed through economic modeling. These models in turn serve as the theoretical foundation for designing and evaluating policy instruments and practices. Students will learn to analyze current environmental problems and assess the effectiveness of environmental and resource-management policies using economic tools.
Gail Carlson
Examines the impacts of changing climate dynamics on human livelihoods, rights, health, and well-being. Through interdisciplinary readings, class discussions, research projects, and innovative communications, students will engage deeply with data from the natural and social sciences about human impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities, as well as explore climate justice activism. Key learning goals include improved information literacy and written and oral communication skills and increased understanding of the ways climate change is impacting the world in which we live. Prerequisite: Environmental Studies 118 or 126..
Atal Ahmadzai
Environmental issues are increasingly becoming intertwined with security and conflicts that emerge from resource scarcity and more recently, because of the differential impacts of climate change. This course offers students a theoretical and policy-based understanding of the security-environment nexus. We examine the role of natural resources in driving conflicts, climate changes impact on security, emerging climate conflicts, environmental peacebuilding, war and the environment, and the geopolitics of the energy transition. Students will gain skills to understand the interplay between ecological changes and political and social conflicts.
Danae Jacobson
We will consider nature’s role in shaping history. How do our stories change when we include microbes, pigs, and the climate, alongside subjects like presidents, wars, and ideas? We will also ask what nature has meant to a range of people including the Comanche on the Great Plains, settler-farmers in New England, and coal miners in Colorado. The aim is that you begin to think about nature differently: how ideas about nature have changed, how nature surrounds & nourishes us and has been used to justify violence & racism, and how nature impedes on our lives.
Luis Millones
This course focuses on contemporary literature and theoretical approaches to speculative fiction and its interplay with environmental fiction in Latin America. We study how these narratives engage topics such as artificial intelligence, social inequality, and environmental justice. And we call attention to how they differ in their response to the technological and environmental challenges of our time from the well-established Anglophone science fiction tradition. Students will identify the principles of speculative and environmental texts and evaluate how these principles are rework artistically and ideologically in Latin American fiction.
Keith Peterson
Since at least the 1970s, philosophers have criticized animal captivity and exploitation, and have been at the forefront of debates in animal ethics and environmentalism. More recent approaches to veganism define it as an intersectional social movement committed to total liberation for nonhumans and humans alike. Through classroom work and field trips, this humanities lab explores the philosophical, political, environmental, and health aspects of veganism as a social movement and mode of subsistence. Students will learn the philosophical principles of animal liberation and environmentalism, the impacts of animal agriculture, basic philosophical writing and critical thinking, and practical skills for leading a vegan life.
Derek Huffman
Scientists have been warning for decades about the impact of human behavior on climate change; however, the response of societies to climate change has been mixed. We will explore this seeming disconnect between science and society. We will discuss how we can leverage many disciplines within psychology (e.g., cognitive neuroscience, social psychology) to study memory, perception, emotion, and decision-making within individuals and groups, with a focus on climate change. We will practice scientific communication across a variety of modalities, and you will write a scientific review paper synthesizing research in your chosen topic area.
Gwyneth Shanks
Collaborative Company: Decolonizing Botany introduces students to a range of collaborative, collective, and community-based artistic methodologies through engaging faculty’s creative research. Course explores relationship between environmental studies and decolonial praxis situated within a transnational and historical framework. Class culminates in students presenting public, participatory performances focused on colonial histories of plants. Center for the Arts and Humanities Environmental Humanities course. Since content will vary, it can be repeated once.
Tiffany Miller
Students will learn about Indigenous understandings of disseminating knowledge in Abiayala (Latin America) as they give back to LatinX migrant students in Maine. Through this civic engagement, students will explore non-Western Indigenous forms of knowledge and issues surrounding migration to the United States from Mexico and Central America while analyzing contemporary issues surrounding LatinX diasporas, land sovereignty, and Critical Indigenous Studies. Topics may include trans-indigeneity, alternative forms of “writing,” oral literature, digital humanities, hybridity, modernity, decoloniality, and ecocriticism.
Carolyn Megan
Reading fiction, essays, and poetry, we will explore the nature of place and landscape as physical, social, and intellectual and consider what it suggests about American culture and ideas. We will consider how place and landscape, both real and imagined, influence writers as well as how these concerns influence our own lives as readers, writers, thinkers, and dreamers. In this first-year writing course, students will write personal narratives, argument, and synthesis as well as develop their critical reading skills.
Sarah Braunstein and Chris Walker
Taking place in Kalimpong, India, this course works at the intersection of civic engagement, creative writing, and environmental humanities to explore the entanglements between literature, ecology, and multispecies communities. Experiencing these entanglements in an unfamiliar setting, we develop creative and critical methodologies for producing knowledge and art without the need to master or manage our connection to the world. Along the way, we ask questions such as: How is place reflected and refracted in its literature? What is the relationship between research, creativity, and activism, and how might these endeavors respond to environmental crises? What can we learn about global environmental challenges by working with local activists? Approximate cost: $4,900. Fulfills English D and LE requirements. Prerequisite: Any W1 course.
Suzanne Menair
Explores human-animal relations in cross-cultural and historical perspective to view the centrality of animals to human existence. Considers the social, symbolic, and economic uses of animals in a variety of contexts, from cockfighting in Bali to the corporate culture of Sea World to central Maine farms. Examines the history and philosophies of the animal rights movement from the anti-vivisection campaigns of 19th-century England to contemporary animal rights protests in the United States. Concludes with an analysis of human animality and animal subjectivity to arrive at a deeper understanding of both human and non-human animals. =
Kassandra Miller
How did ancient Greeks and Romans make sense of the world around them? And how did they use technology to exert control over that world? This Humanities Lab offers an introduction to scientific and technological developments in the ancient Mediterranean and their afterlives in Islamic, Enlightenment, and modern-day science. We begin by exploring ancient scientific theories and practices relating to astronomy, physics, biology, medicine, geography, and mathematics. Then, with the help of Colby’s Museum of Art and the Mule Works Innovation Lab, we will research and create 3-D printed models of technologies involved in constructing, outfitting, and enjoying a Roman bath complex.
Jen Meredith
The objective is to develop and apply economic tools to current environmental and resource-management issues. Causes of and remedies to environmental and resource-management problems are analyzed through economic modeling. These models in turn serve as the theoretical foundation for designing and evaluating policy instruments and practices. Students will learn to analyze current environmental problems and assess the effectiveness of environmental and resource-management policies using economic tools.
Sanval Nasim
Developing countries face a range of environmental issues, including poor air quality, mismanaged water resources, and unsustainable land use. Even countries with progressive economic indicators often struggle to improve environmental outcomes. Why does environmental quality continue to stagnate in developing countries? What policies can we implement to address environmental challenges? How can we leverage data to inform policymaking? We explore these questions by surveying the empirical economic research on the environment in the Global South. We will identify methodological trends, types and sources of data, and areas for policy intervention.
Chris Walker
What counts as “writing”? Can a bacteria or an algorithm write poetry? Is “creativity” an exclusively human activity or an inherent property of all life? In this writing-intensive course we will address these and other questions as we hone our critical thinking and reading, develop our research abilities, and refine our writing and editing skills. Engaging philosophical essays, poetry, plays, and film, we will analyze how the categories of “human,” “animal,” and “machine” are historically constructed, politically mobilized, and ethically fraught.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
What can literature teach us about nature and environmental justice? Do the humanities and environmental studies share a vision of a sustainable future? Is it possible to understand climate change without telling stories about its uneven global impacts? To address these and other questions, we will examine how the environmental humanities implicitly respond to the “two cultures” debate. We will then investigate the relationship between environmental justice and western societies’ extractive logics, economies, and management of nature. From within this theoretical framework we will analyze novels, poetry, and environmental films.
Melissa Heide
Since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, writers, thinkers, and scientists have developed the dynamic fields of environmental sciences and humanities, wrestling with our current ecological moment, the Anthropocene. With the rise of ecological thought, scholars of the Middle Ages have directed their gaze backward, seeing what we can learn about history and historical texts from their depictions of, and interactions with, the natural world. Students will practice the art of transhistorical critical reading, learning how to think and read ecologically when encountering texts from the premodern past.
Melissa Heide
Introduces students to the history and diverse traditions of global environmental writing. By analyzing this tradition, students will gain mastery over a range of methods for interpreting representations of nature, human-environment relations, and nonhuman animals, with a focus on how these representations intersect with the history of environmental racism and environmental justice movements. Topics may include the history of ecocriticism, ecopoetics, queer ecologies, animal studies, posthumanism, and postcolonial ecocriticism.
Justin Becknell, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
An introduction to the multi study of the relationship between humans and the world around us. Through an examination of the most pressing environmental problems–such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental racism–students will be introduced to methods and key concepts of Environmental Studies. Through lectures, case studies, and collaborative work, students will assess the strengths and weaknesses of approaching environmental problems from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and gain tools to work toward a more just environmental future.
Bess Koffman
Takes a systems approach to studying Earth’s climate by linking the primary systems operating at Earth’s surface, i.e., lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere. Explores the mechanisms that shape environmental evolution across a range of time scales, including the role of humans, and uses past (paleo) records of change to place modern climate change in geological context. Students will engage with material through problem sets, data analysis, interactive lectures, primary literature synthesis, and writing. Laboratory projects will provide hands-on opportunities to develop local records of past environmental change.
Keith Peterson
Aims to familiarize students with the many philosophical approaches that have been developed over the past few decades in response to the environmental crisis. It covers not only classical issues such as anthropocentrism and the intrinsic value of nature, but also supplies the conceptual tools needed to tackle the complex ethical, political, cultural, scientific, and practical dimensions of human relations to more-than-human nature. Special attention will be devoted to the topics of nonhuman animals, food, energy, and climate change.
Gail Carlson
How human health is affected by physical, chemical, biological, and social environments; how we use science to measure effects of these determinants at the level of cell, tissue, individual, and population; how we assess these determinants to make regulatory decisions. Topics include introductions to toxicology, epidemiology, and risk assessment; health effects of pollution, synthetic chemicals, consumer products, climate change, and the built environment; the etiology of health outcomes including cancer, obesity, endocrine disruption, and respiratory diseases. Students use primary scientific literature for independent research and, when appropriate, engage in environmental health policy debates in Congress and/or the Maine legislature.
Ben Fallaw
How has the environment shaped modern Latin American history, and how have modern Latin American nations, societies, and economies altered the regionÂ’s different environments? We critically read primary and secondary sources (scholarly monographs, academic journal articles, primary sources in translation) and write a substantial research paper. Readings explore the historical roots of contemporary environmental problems facing the Latin American Pacific, the Amazon basin, and deserts, and plains like the Argentine Pampas. Other readings explore how different ethnic groups (colonial Iberians, Indigenous, Afrodescendants, U.S., elite Latin Americans) viewed nature in Latin America.
Kerill O’Neill
The Eclogues have exerted a tremendous influence on later poets across Europe and the Americas. Virgil’s bucolic poetry draws on ancient learning, contemporary politics, and his own artistic sensibility.
Ashton Wesner
Scientists working in laboratories and field sites are members of broader social, cultural, and political communities: This seminar builds on STS critiques science and extends them further to explore how feminist, queer, and trans scientists have developed research methods, practices, and protocols that (re)shape life sciences toward social justice ends. How can critical humanities frameworks, and the biological sciences, build new ways of doing science? Students apply theoretical frameworks from their readings to practices like specimen and sample collection, research design and laboratory experimentation, divisions of labor and academic productivity, and community engagement and scholar-activism.
Carolyn Megan
Reading fiction, essays, and poetry, we will explore the nature of place and landscape as physical, social, and intellectual and consider what it suggests about American culture and ideas. We will consider how place and landscape, both real and imagined, influence writers as well as how these concerns influence our own lives as readers, writers, thinkers, and dreamers. In this first-year writing course, students will write personal narratives, argument, and synthesis as well as develop their critical reading skills.
Laura Fugikawa
Studies the important role Indigenous storytellers/theorists play in knowledge production and cultural continuance. Using an intersectional lens, the course considers Native knowledge production and its importance to Native, feminist, and queer of color theories. We will study the ways that storytelling illustrates cultural continuance and political sovereignty, as well as represents the politics of resistance to, and refusal of, settler colonial practices. In what ways can Native storytelling engage shifting temporalities: how is the past recalled, the present negotiated, and new possibilities for the future imagined?
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