The Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities (SIEH) gathers scholars from around the globe to collectively explore how the Environmental Humanities contribute to the theorization, imagination, and practice of socially just and ecologically hopeful futures for humans and nonhumans. For each iteration of the Summer Institute, we select some of the most respected scholars in environmental humanities to present lectures on their current research, lead seminars on the most important questions facing the discipline, and guide works-in-progress workshops where the research of every participant is critiqued and polished by their peers. In addition to this intense scholarly engagement, we take full advantage of Maine’s natural and cultural treasures. Participants recharge, forge connections, and find inspiration during excursions to Allen Island, the Colby Arboretum, and the Colby Museum of Art. The week-long timeline allows new friendships and professional relationships to develop, creating an enduring network of Institute Alumni Fellows.
If you are an academic, artist, activist, or independent scholar with a passion for the environmental humanities, we invite you to join us in beautiful Maine from July 28 – August 2, 2025, for a week of seminars, lectures, workshops, field trips, and other events.
The sixth annual Summer Institute seminar leaders will be Allison Carruth, Professor in the Program in American Studies and High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University; Hi’ilei Hobart, Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University; Hsuan L. Hsu, Professor of English, UC Davis; and Max Liboiron, Associate Professor of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
The application period for the 2025 iteration of the SIEH is open! The deadline to apply is Friday, February 7, 2025 at 12:00am EST (midnight). For FAQs, please see this page.
If you have further questions about the SIEH, please email Program Coordinator Portia Hardy at [email protected].
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is the recipient of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Best First Book Prize, the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press, and received an honorable mention for the Lara Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA).
Hobart’s articles have appeared in refereed journals such as NAIS, Media+Environment, Food, Culture, and Society, and The Journal of Transnational American Studies, among others. Her article “At Home on the Mauna: Ecological Violence and Fantasies of Terra Nullius on Maunakea’s Summit,” received the 2020 NAISA prize for “Most Thought-Provoking Article” in the field of Native and Indigenous Studies. She is the co-editor the special issue “Radical Care,” for Social Text (2020) and editor of the special issue “Foodways of Hawaiʻi” for Food, Culture, and Society (2016), which was republished as an edited volume for Routledge (2018).
Hsuan l. Hsu joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His research areas include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities.
He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (NYU, 2020), and Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury Object Lessons, 2024). He is currently working on a book that considers how artists and writers have been experimenting with smell as a medium sensorial worldmaking.
Dr. Max Liboiron’s research, mentorship, and administrative work focus on developing and promoting anticolonial methods in a wide array of disciplines and spaces. As founder of CLEAR, an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations, Liboiron has influenced national policy on both plastics and Indigenous research, invented technologies and protocols for community monitoring of plastics, and created protocols for fostering research collectives. Recently, they are a co-director of the IndigeLab Network, a new international research hub where Indigenous researchers collaborate on innovative methods for creating and maintaining research collectives.
Liboiron’s first book, Pollution is Colonialism (Duke Press, 2021), bridges Science and Technology Studies (STS), Indigenous studies, and discard studies while providing a framework for understanding all research methods as practices that align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the text models an anticolonial scientific foregrounding land, ethics, and relations, and demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced. One reviewer for the book wrote that the text “is at the leading edge of a significant turn in STS towards thinking with settler-colonialism as a structure and terrain and contributes significantly as well to thinking about how ethical principles related to lab science and studies of pollution and shorelines. There are exceedingly few texts of this kind that ask, how might we consider relations with land/waters and science – and still practice ‘good’ science?”
The fifth annual Summer Institute welcomed a dynamic group of scholars and artists for a week of discussions that explored new dimensions of environmental thought. Participants engaged with themes as diverse as community knowledge sharing, non-human animal rights, and global environmental justice and the intersections of culture, gender, and sustainability. The 2024 seminar leaders were Marisol de la Cadena, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis; Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale; Jason W. Moore, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University; and Astrida Neimanis, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of British Columbia.
The fourth annual summer institute of 2023 brought together a diverse set of scholars and artists working at the intersections of race and the environment, Native studies in environmental visual cultures, environmental philosophy beyond the United States, and much more. The 2023 seminar leaders were Brian Burkhart, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Interim Director of the Native Nations Center at the University of Oklahoma; Ursula K. Heise, Professor of English and Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; Barbara Muraca, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon; and Craig Santos Perez, Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa.
In 2022, we returned to a full in-person experience for a week of exciting events and thought-provoking conversations. The 2022 seminar leaders were Sunil Amrith, Professor of History at Yale University; Mel Chen, Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Professor of English at the University of California; and Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London.
As has been the case with so many academic events, the 2021 Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities was modified by the pandemic, adopting a hybrid format to support the safest possible experience for all participants. The 2021 guest lecturers were Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon; Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor of English and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Imre Szeman, Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. There was also a spotlight lecture by Krushil Watene, Associate Professor of Humanities Media and Creative Communications at Massey University in New Zealand.
4165 Mayflower Hill
Waterville, Maine 04901
P: 207-859-4165
[email protected]
© Copyright – 2021, Colby College
