Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Environmental Humanities 2023-24

  • In this talk, J.T. Roane — building off of his short experimental film Plot and the experience of working with the organization Just Harvest and the Rappahannock Nation to plant a mutual aid garden in Tappahannock — reflected on the healing act of working the land together under the structural and discursive conditions of shared histories of violence. Calling for us to center the intimacy of place when confronting existential threats of planetary scope, he offered a reading of writer and activist June Jordan’s injunction to “mourn the loss of every possible, joyous life” — to attend to the specificity of the living and dying.


    About the Speaker

    J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Africana studies and geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in global racial justice at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. His book Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place was published in 2023 by New York University Press. His short experimental film Plot received support from Princeton’s Crossroads Fellowship. He also currently serves as a member of Just Harvest—Tidewater, an Indigenous- and Black-led organization building toward food sovereignty and justice in Virginia’s historical plantation region through political and practical education. He is a 2023–24 visiting scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.


    Presented by the Environmental Humanities at Brown initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  • In 1976 writer and activist June Jordan outlined a proposed novel titled “Okay Now!” beginning with the powerful statement: “We must learn to share the earth, while there is still time to try.” Written during a watershed moment in Black environmental consciousness in the early 1970s, the unpublished novel centers Black social and economic vulnerability within an analysis of the American landscape and, articulating a vision for terraforming mississippi-america, a radical but practical reterritorialization through the collective reimagining of property and urban and rural relations shaped by her encounters with Black Mississippi freedom organizers.

    Usually associated with the remaking of another planet for human inhabitance, terraforming here encompasses Jordan’s critique of the current order of things as unlivable and the radical re-envisioning of the landscape on the future horizon as a space that might support Black possibility and futurity superseding the histories of slavery, violence, and ecological degradation.

    In this workshop, scholar J.T. Roane drew attention to her search for a more just social-spatial-environmental order through her use of literature, essays, and poetry to compel ordinary people to view themselves as holding the keys to a radical reformulation of the future landscape.


    About the Speaker

    J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Africana studies and geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in global racial justice at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. His book Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place was published in 2023 by New York University Press. His short experimental film Plot received support from Princeton’s Crossroads Fellowship. He also currently serves as a member of Just Harvest—Tidewater, an Indigenous- and Black-led organization building toward food sovereignty and justice in Virginia’s historical plantation region through political and practical education. He is a 2023–24 visiting scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.


    Presented by the Environmental Humanities at Brown initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  • Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.

    Nonfiction@Brown

    Nonfiction@Brown is an annual lecture series celebrating the diverse voices that define this ever-more-popular and relevant genre. The series honors working writers in various nonfiction genres, including literary reportage, lyric essay, personal essay, creative nonfiction, podcasting, journalism, and biography, amongst many others.

    Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture

    This lectureship, sponsored by Brown University and the Goldway/Shearer Family, was established in memory of Casey Shearer ’00, a promising young writer and aspiring sportscaster who died in May 2000, days before he was to graduate Brown. 

    All events are free and open to the public. 

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  • Since the dawn of the modern environmental movement, one of the greatest difficulties has been in finding effective modes of communication to prompt vigilant attention and appropriate action. Rachel Carson’s “A Fable for Tomorrow” ( Silent Spring , 1962) is a particularly notable example of an environmental warning, but it fits into a long tradition of environmental warnings — or jeremiads — in American literature, which continues, with increasing urgency, to the present.

    This talk used ideas from cognitive psychology and communication studies to trace the discourse of environmental warning from John Muir to the ongoing “World Scientists’ Warning[s] to Humanity” and also addressed the challenge of crafting poignant warnings for busy, complacent, anxious, and/or “infowhelmed” audiences.


    About the Speaker

    Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho and senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute. He has been particularly devoted to charting the historical development of environmental literary studies, encouraging the international development of this scholarly approach, and exploring the intersections between ecocriticism and such disciplines as environmental communication studies, the medical humanities, and cognitive psychology.

    A prolific author and editor in the environmental humanities, Slovic’s most recent publications include the coedited volumes Nature and Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022), The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), and Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives (Lexington Books, 2023). He was the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in the early 1990s, and from 1995 to 2020, he served as editor-in-chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , the central journal in the field of ecocriticism. He is currently coeditor of the book series Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment and Routledge Environmental Humanities and a contributing editor for www.arithmeticofcompassion.org.


    Presented by the Environmental Humanities at Brown initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  • What can plants tell us about the human condition, and more broadly about the rapidly changing conditions of life and death on Earth? This meeting was on the topic of fruits. As the ultimate sites of intimacy, decadence, subterfuge, and beauty, flowers, and the seeds and fruits that they bear, carry the promise and aspirations of future life. Audacious colors, heady odors, and sumptuous flavors combine to make fruits irresistible. Fruits and flowers bring plants into intimate relation with other beings and elements as parts of their procreative agenda. Plants embody queer possibilities of kinship across the species barrier and without heteronormative sex as a guiding principle and thus provide a generative space from which to reimagine human kinship otherwise. Thinking with fruits opens possibilities in aesthetics, symbolics, and economics.


    About the Botanical Humanities Series

    Critical and creative studies of plants in anthropogenic environments, or what we broadly call the botanical humanities, is now a burgeoning field with roots across many disciplinary terrains, including the social sciences, humanities, arts, and natural sciences. Plant-focused courses and events in and beyond the academy are regularly full to overflowing. Yet, as the field expands into new areas, educators are faced with a challenge. This meeting was part of a New England Humanities Consortium (NEHC) project that aims to gather the lively energies surrounding plants today and the expertise of co-PIs Elaine Gan (Wesleyan University, Science and Technology Studies), Colin Hoag (Smith College, Anthropology), and Xan Chacko (Brown University, Science, Technology, and Society), and regional collaborators, and direct them toward the development of a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary curriculum.

    The reading group will have three hybrid meetings in this botanical humanities series; “Fruits,” “Shoots,” and “Roots.” Each meeting also seeks to brainstorm pedagogical innovations that might make the botanical humanities tractable across disciplines and varied classroom settings.


    About the Reading Group

    The 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. The group is open to all.


    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group is part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB). This session was coordinated by Xan Chacko, lecturer in science, technology, and society.

  • Shoots have been maligned in social theory as presenting a phallic understanding of knowledge, power, and action. Thinking with trees might confine us to a linear historical imagination full of hero narratives, and instead we might supplant trees with rhizomes, for example, or other subterranean structures. This response to masculinist theories of life is a valuable one. Yet, shoots and other aboveground structures present other possibilities than the tree.

    Shoots constitute an intergrade across body and world. They are a space of dialogue across the pedosphere from which plants derive stability, nutrients, and water, and the atmosphere or heliosphere from which plants derive carbon and the energy to transform it into starches. As functional units of anatomy and physiology, they draw water and food through vascular tissues, but also represent crucial bodily performances. They are the structures through which plants present themselves to others — reaching toward a canopy, presenting reproductive organs, dispersing seeds. Shoots alert us to the critical everyday labor demanded of plant life, as well as the porosity of selves and the performance of self.

    Register to attend on Zoom and receive the readings for the session.

    About the Botanical Humanities Series

    Critical and creative studies of plants in anthropogenic environments, or what we broadly call the botanical humanities, is now a burgeoning field with roots across many disciplinary terrains, including the social sciences, humanities, arts, and natural sciences. Plant-focused courses and events in and beyond the academy are regularly full to overflowing. Yet, as the field expands into new areas, educators are faced with a challenge. This meeting is part of a New England Humanities Consortium (NEHC) project that aims to gather the lively energies surrounding plants today and the expertise of co-PIs Elaine Gan (Wesleyan University, Science and Technology Studies), Colin Hoag (Smith College, Anthropology), and Xan Chacko (Brown University, Science, Technology, and Society), and regional collaborators, and direct them toward the development of a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary curriculum.

    The reading group will have three hybrid meetings in this botanical humanities series; “Fruits,” “Shoots,” and “Roots.” Each meeting also seeks to brainstorm pedagogical innovations that might make the botanical humanities tractable across disciplines and varied classroom settings.

    About the Reading Group

    The 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. The group is open to all.

    The Environmental Humanities Reading Group is part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB). This session is coordinated by Xan Chacko, lecturer in science, technology, and society. The readings will be selected by Colin Hoag, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Smith College.

    Register to attend on Zoom and receive the readings