Why Study the Environmental Humanities?
Environmental Humanities is a two-year degree training the next generation of environmental leaders and thinkers. This fully-funded master’s program positions students to study climate change, resilience, advocacy and other interests in preparation for changing the world. We encourage creative and scholarly exchanges toward new forms of environmental leadership and environmental justice.
Stay Informed
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Daniel Hernandez / Arcia Tecun: Fall 2023 Community Practioner-in-Residence
Daniel Hernandez/ Arcia Tecun is the Fall 2023 Community Practitioner in Residence at the University of Utah Environmental Humanities Program. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the residency program aims to forge reciprocal relationships with community leaders who are using the tools of humanities and culture to further transform solutions to the climate crisis and environmental racism.
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Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities: Dr. Greg Sarris
Please join us on Tuesday, Sept. 19 when the Environmental Humanities Program awards Greg Sarris - author, scholar, teacher and Chair of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria - the fifth Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities.
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We're hiring!
Come join us! Thanks to a generous award from the Mellon Foundation, the Environmental Humanities Program seeks a Community Engagement and Outreach Coordinator to play an important role in developing and executing the Environmental Humanities Program’s community engagement and outreach strategy with the goal of furthering environmental justice on campus and the wider Salt Lake community.
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Environmental Humanities Program recognized with grant renewal
The Environmental Humanities Graduate program at the University of Utah trains the next generation of environmental leaders and thinkers, positioning them to study climate change, resilience, advocacy and environmental justice in preparation for changing the world. In recognition of the program’s environmental impact, the Mellon Foundation has awarded them with a three-year grant renewal, providing $791,000 to fund graduate fellowships, create leadership pathways for students from underrepresented groups, collaborate with communities directly affected by climate change and environmental racism and work closely with grassroots leaders.

"Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy"
Danielle Endres
"This handbook offers a comprehensive transdisciplinary examination of the research and practices that constitute the emerging research agenda in energy democracy. With protests over fossil fuels and controversies over nuclear and renewable energy technologies, democratic ideals have contributed to an emerging social movement. Energy democracy captures this movement and addresses the issues of energy access, ownership, and participation at a time when there are expanding social, political, environmental, and economic demands on energy systems. This volume defines energy democracy as both a social movement and an academic area of study and examines it through a social science and humanities lens, explaining key concepts and reflecting state-of-the-art research."

"Eden's Endemics: Narratives of Biodiversity on Earth and Beyond"
Elizabeth Callaway
"In the past thirty years biodiversity has become one of the central organizing principles through which we understand the nonhuman environment. Its deceptively simple definition as the variation among living organisms masks its status as a hotly contested term both within the sciences and more broadly. In Eden's Endemics, Elizabeth Callaway looks to cultural objects - novels, memoirs, databases, visualizations, and poetry - that depict many species at once to consider the question of how we narrate organisms in their multiplicity."

"Conrad and Nature: Essays"
Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy (with Lissa Schneider-Rebozo and John G. Peters)
"Conrad and Nature is the first collection of critical essays examining nature and the environment in Joseph Conrad's writings. Together, these essays by established and emerging scholars reveal both the crucial importance of nature in Conrad's work, and the vital, ongoing relevance of Conrad's treatment of the environment in our era of globalization and climate change. No richer subject matter for an environmentally-engaged criticism can be found than the Conradian contexts and themes under investigation in this volume: island cultures, colonial occupations, storms at sea, mining and extraction, inconstant weather, ecological collapse, and human communities competing for resources."

"Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ"
DanielleEndres (Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, and Samantha Senda-Cook)
"Increasingly, rhetorical scholars are using fieldwork and other ethnographic, performance, and qualitative methods to access, document, and analyze forms of everyday in situ rhetoric rather than using already documented texts. In this book, the authors argue that participatory critical rhetoric, as an approach to in situ rhetoric, is a theoretically, mathodologically, and praxiologically robust approach to critical rhetorical studies."

"The Ecological Rift"
Brett Clark (with John Bellamy Foster and Richard York)
"Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosytems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision - if we dont alter course."

"Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century"
Gregory Smoak
"This innovative cultural history examines wide-ranging issues of religion, politics, and identity through an analysis of the American Indian Ghost Dance movement and its significance for two little-studied tribes: the Shoshones and Bannocks. The Ghost Dance has become a metaphor for the death of American Indian culture, but as Gregory Smoak argues, it was not the desperate fantasy of a dying people but a powerful expression of a racialized 'Indianness.'"
Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities
The Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities celebrates environmental leadership
and expression. It honors those who
solve the planet’s environmental problems using the tools of the humanities, such
as creative expression,
scholarly research, popular art forms and advocacy.