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 27 – August 1, 2026, for a week of seminars, lectures, workshops, field trips, and other events.
The seventh annual Summer Institute seminar leaders will be Mishuana Goeman, Professor and Chair of Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo; Macarena Gómez-Barris, Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Director of the Center for Environmental Humanities, Brown University; Nicole Seymour, Professor of English and Graduate Advisor for Environmental Studies, California State University at Fullerton; and Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film & Media, University of University of California, Berkeley!
The application period for the 2026 iteration of the SIEH has now closed. For FAQs, please see this page.
If you have further questions about the SIEH, please email Program Coordinator Portia Hardy at [email protected].
Mishuana Goeman, PhD, daughter of enrolled Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan, is currently a professor of Indigenous studies at University of Buffalo (on leave from UCLA’s gender studies and American Indian studies). Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021) which won the choice award in 2021. Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as co-pi on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous LA (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities. Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She is the principal investigator of the University of California President’s office multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times. She also headed up the Mukurtu California Native Hub (2021) housed at UCLA through an NEH sub-grant, which supports local tribal organizations and nations to start their cultural heritage and language digitally sovereign sites through the Mukurtu platform. She is also a co-pi on Haudenosaunee Archival Research and Knowledge (Hark), a Mellon funded project at University at Buffalo (2023). She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest-edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Her work from 2018-2022 included holding the inaugural special advisor position at UCLA, where she worked across campus to better Indigenous relationships. From 2020-2021 she was a distinguished visiting scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University at Buffalo, located in her home territories. In 2023, she began her role as the president-elect of the American Studies Association.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities and extractivism, media environments, cultural theory and artistic practice.
She is author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press.
Her forthcoming book is At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. She is on the Social Text Collective and is author of dozens of esssays and curatorial events. She is founder and director of the Elemental Media Lab hosted by the Department of Modern Culture and Media.
Nicole Seymour works in the environmental humanities, asking how literature and other cultural forms – from documentary film to standup comedy – mediate our relationship to environmental crisis. Before coming to CSUF, she held positions at the University of Louisville, the University of Arkansas, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her first monograph, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, won the 2015 scholarly book award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Her second, Bad Environmentalism: Affect and Dissent in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), recuperates irreverent and anti-sentimental expressions of environmentalism and was recognized by the Chicago Review of Books as among the “Best Nature Writing of 2018.” Her latest book is Glitter, an environmental-cultural history of that substance from Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series. Dr. Seymour enjoys working with students on research and public activism projects such as Climate Change Theatre Action.
Nicole Starosielski conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network(link is external) (2015), Media Hot and Cold(link is external) (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure(link is external) (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment(link is external) (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media(link is external) (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements(link is external)” book series at Duke University Press.
Starosielski’s most recent project, Sustainable Subsea Networks(link is external), is focused on increasing the sustainability of digital infrastructures. The project team has developed a catalog of best practices for sustainability in the subsea cable industry—the backbone of the global internet—as well as a carbon footprint of a subsea cable. Starosielski is also a co-convenor of the SubOptic Association’s Global Citizen Working Group.
The sixth annual Summer Institute hosted a creative group of scholars and artists for an exciting week of discussions and community building. Themes around intentional methodologies, smell-scapes, and recreational pleasurescapes were explored by participants. The sixth annual Summer Institute seminar leaders were 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 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.
