The Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) has been established July 1, 2024. CEHAB is an intellectual community focused on environmental learning and research in the humanities. We are faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates who study environmental topics from a wide variety of humanistic disciplines. CEHAB includes speaker series, workshops, and reading groups, and is a resource for identifying faculty members who work in this area and the courses they offer.
The environmental humanities have emerged as a dynamic site of multidisciplinary research and teaching that brings the diverse methods of the humanities to bear on understanding the more-than-human world and our relationship(s) with it. Such interdisciplinary endeavors are urgently needed, as the environmental challenges confronting us today rank among the most complex and most pressing that humanity has ever faced. The humanistic disciplines provide historical perspective on how we got here and offer a rich array of resources for imagining and enacting different, more environmentally sustainable ways of life.
While CEHAB coordinates events and intellectual initiatives in environmental humanities, it also encourages collaboration with researchers in the natural and social sciences who study the environment. We partner informally with related groups on campus such as the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) and the Science and Technology Studies program (STS) to help faculty and students to connect diverse fields of study in their research and teaching on the environment.