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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Faculty Feature: Taylor Brorby
Taylor Brorby is the current Annie Clark Annie Clark Tanner Teaching & Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities. He is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council.
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An afternoon with Taylor Brorby | Mar 29, 4p
Celebrate Pride Week by joining Taylor Brorby, Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities for a reading and discussion of his memoir, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, on March 29 at 4p in the Jewel Box (CTIHB 145). Refreshments provided.
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Community Engagement Spotlight: Tessa Scheuer
Tessa has worked in the field of environmental education with organizations such as Summit Land Conservancy and Conserve Utah Valley to help spread awareness and appreciation for the natural world. Tessa’s research in the Environmental Humanities focuses on environmental education as a method of fostering resiliency and connection in the face of climate change. Tessa’s thesis work combines accessible, digital education and experiential learning methods to encourage emotional resiliency and place-based sensory connection as a way to understand and confront eco-anxiety and climate grief.
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Faculty Feature: Chris Ingraham
Chris Ingraham is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and on the core faculty of the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah. His work as an active teacher and researcher is in the areas of media aesthetics, environmental communication, and rhetorical theory. Generally, he tries to draw on the insights of these fields to think about the material, aesthetic, and affective practices that configure the environments we create and inhabit. Before becoming an academic, he worked for several years as a freelance writer. Though the arts remain central to his interests, his academic training across the humanities commits him to cross-disciplinary thinking with the belief that we should bring all available knowledge to the problems we're trying to understand.

"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.