Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Environmental Humanities 2019–20

Image above: Bénédicte Boisseron, Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, speaks in Pembroke Hall on November 15, 2019.

  •  Location: 79 Brown Street, Sharpe HouseRoom: 125

    March 5, 2020

    In April 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and sent upwards of 50 million curies into the surrounding environment. Working through Soviet archives, Kate Brown encountered many contradictory accounts of the disaster and its effects. Realizing that though people and archives lie, trees probably don’t, she turned to scientists — biologists, foresters, physicians, and physicists — to help her understand the ecology of the greater Chernobyl territories and the health effects that ensued. She learned working in the swampy territory around the blown plant that radioactive contaminants saturated local eco-systems long before the Chernobyl accident and continued long after the 1986 event. Brown argued that to call Chernobyl an “accident” is to sweep aside the continuum of radiation exposure that saturated environments in the northern hemisphere in the second half of the 20th century. Instead of a one-off accident, Brown argued that Chernobyl was a point of acceleration on a timeline of radioactive contamination that continues to this day.

    Kate Brown is Professor of History in the Science, Technology and Society Department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of the prize-winning histories Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2004). Kate Brown was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has also been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the NEH, ACLS, IREX, and the American Academy of Berlin, among others. Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future was published March 2019 by Norton (US), Penguin Lane (UK), Czarne (Poland). In 2020, it will be translated into Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, French, Spanish, and Korean.

    This event, free and open to the public, was presented by the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), and was co-sponsored by the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB) with the Department of History.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 003

    December 5, 2019

    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group aims to foster an informal and interdisciplinary community around the environmental humanities at Brown. At each meeting an assigned reading serves as a jumping off point to discuss the role that the humanities might play in confronting environmental crisis and supporting environmental justice.

    This meeting took the form of a workshop session featuring informal five-minute talks by a small cohort of presenters about a work in progress (article, book, dissertation, chapter, etc.). 

    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group is part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB), and was coordinated by graduate student Michael Putnam in 2018–19.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: TBD

    November 15, 2019

    The discussion of this workshop focused on “The Commensal Dog in a Creole Context,” a chapter from Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia University Press, 2018) which revisits the concept of commensalism within a Caribbean, interspecies and (post-)colonial context.

    Commensalism, a relationship between two organisms in which one benefits without damage or benefit to the other, is envisioned through the lens of an anticolonial, anti-hegemonic, and anti-anthropocentric context. By addressing the compoundedness of domestication and colonialism, this chapter explores ways to think about relationships beyond a human-animal divide and beyond white supremacy.

    Bénédicte Boisseron is Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She specializes in the fields of black diaspora studies, francophone studies, and animal studies. She is the author of Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (University Press of Florida, 2014), 2015 winner of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Her most recent book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia University Press, 2018), draws on recent debates about black life and animal rights to investigate the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic. 

    This event, presented as part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB), was co-sponsored by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships and Publications Fund; the Departments of French Studies, History, and Religious Studies; the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES); the Program in Science, Technology, and Society; and the Watson Institute.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    November 14, 2019

    Drawing on recent debates about black lives and animal welfare both coincidentally on the rise in America, Bénédicte Boisseron investigated in this talk the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic. This conversation is part of the fast-growing interest in human-animal relationships across the humanities and social sciences, an academic trend commonly referred to as ‘the animal turn.’

    Bénédicte Boisseron is Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She specializes in the fields of black diaspora studies, francophone studies, and animal studies. She is the author of Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (University Press of Florida, 2014), 2015 winner of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Her most recent book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia University Press, 2018), draws on recent debates about black life and animal rights to investigate the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic.

    This event, free and open to the public, was presented as part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB). It was co-sponsored by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships and Publications Fund; the Departments of French Studies, History, and Religious Studies; the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES); the Program in Science, Technology, and Society; and the Watson Institute.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 003

    October 24, 2019

    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group aims to foster an informal and interdisciplinary community around the environmental humanities at Brown. At each meeting an assigned reading serves as a jumping off point to discuss the role that the humanities might play in confronting environmental crisis and supporting environmental justice.

    This meeting focused on selections from Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog (Columbia University Press, 2018) in anticipation of Boisseron’s lecture and workshop on November 14 and 15 at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group is part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB), and was coordinated by graduate student Michael Putnam in 2018–19.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 003

    September 26, 2019

    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group aims to foster an informal and interdisciplinary community around the environmental humanities at Brown. At each meeting an assigned reading serves as a jumping off point to discuss the role that the humanities might play in confronting environmental crisis and supporting environmental justice.

    At this inaugural meeting, the discussion concentrated on a few recent attempts to define the “environmental humanities,” and to think through the group’s aspirations for the semester.

    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group is part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB), and was coordinated by graduate student Michael Putnam in 2018–19.