New Courses, Research, Expand Bucknell’s Environmental Humanities Offerings
The Bucknell English Department is taking a lead role in development of innovative environmental humanities undergraduate studies. Five new courses being offered by the English and History departments in the 2007-08 academic year, a record number of undergraduate research projects in environmental humanities, a visiting speakers series, and exciting new research into early Native American-European relations in the
The new courses will provide an array of opportunities to undergraduates from experience in writing nature essays with a leading American nature writer to studying 20th-century American environmental history and reading medieval Norse sagas in the light of modern environmental phenomenology. This academic year will also see the second annual Bucknell Humanities Institute in a row focused on environmental humanities, entitled “American Writers/American Places: Toward a Poetics and a Practice of Sustainability.” It follows last year’s series of speakers on “Redefining Nature’s Boundaries: Premodern and Postmodern Confluences.”
A university focus year on the Susquehanna River with a primary orientation in ecological humanities studies is also being planned for 2008-09; it is based partly around new groundbreaking research by Prof. Katherine Faull in Foreign Languages/Comparative Humanities on a new model for understanding early European/Native American cultural interactions in the 18th-century Susquehanna Valley, following up on her earlier studies on Moravian culture, including Moravian Women's Memoirs: their Related Lives 1750-1820.
The new courses and speaker series are being offered in an academic year that follows a summer with a record number of Bucknell students working on summer undergraduate research in environmental humanities—five in areas ranging from ecocritical study of nature and race in the writings of James Fenimore Cooper to Sufism and nature in Rumi’s poetry and tree symbolism in early medieval European poetry—and which also saw a student in environmental humanities, Sarah Reese ’07, win a university Miller Prize for outstanding student honors thesis. The work of Reese, a double major in English and Environmental Studies, focused on an ecocritical reading of the novel Solar Storms by the American Indian writer Linda Hogan. Reese has entered the English Ph.D. program at
This summer’s undergraduate research projects include one on Cooper, nature and race by James Rickard ‘08, and others on Rumi, Sufism and nature, by Naomi Hossain ’08; The Dream of the Rood and Norse tree mythology by Nick Hovan ’08; an examination of Nietzche’s view of nature by Conrad Moore ’11; and a study of The Wooing of Etain and early Irish land ethics, by Joey McMullen ’09. Hossain’s summer research is sponsored by a Bucknell Environmental Center Fellowship, Rickard’s by the McKenna fellowship program, and Hovan’s, Moore’s, and McMullen’s by the Bucknell Program for Undergraduate Research.
New course offerings in the field include:
English 201, Nature Writing/Writing Nature, taught by Chris Camuto, assistant professor of English. This new course, crosslisted in Environmental Studies, surveys the tradition of nature writing in English in terms of how nature is inscribed in language and expressed by literary forms. It will explore the theory and practice of writing about nature—landscapes, wildlife, ecosystems—as the literal and figurative ground of human being. Students will discuss the poetics of deep ecology, tropes of sustainability, the grammar of eco-awareness, and other concepts of post-modern awareness of nature. As writers they will focus on the use of the essay form as a narrative device for exploring and expressing the relations of human consciousness with the natural world. Likely readings include works by Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Aldo Leopold, Jane Goodall, Wendell Berry, Wordsworth, Cather, Annie Proulx, Rick Bass, Pete Matthiessen, and Andrea Barrett.
History 212, American Environmental History, taught by Assistant History and Environmental Studies Professor Diana L. DiStefano. The course will explore how Americans interacted with their landscape during the 20th century, and how American conceptions of land use, natural beauty, conservation, and preservation, changed over time from the wilderness cult of the Progressive Era to the environmental justice movements of today. Topics covered include: preservation and conservation; drought; suburbanization; pesticide use; natural disasters; “eco-terrorism;” the urban environment; and current conceptions of “wilderness.” Readings will include Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature; Donald Worster, Dustbowl; Adam Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Ted Steinberg, Acts of God; Edward Abby, The Monkeywrench Gang; David Naquib, Garbage Wars; John Krakauer, Into the Wild. Prof. DiStefano, new at Bucknell this year, specializes in the American West, North American history, and Native American history.
English 340, Haunted Nature: Norse Sagas and Ecocriticism, taught by Assistant Professor Alf Siewers. The seminar examines the relation of landscape, culture and family history in the major early Icelandic sagas, in relation to phenomenology as an underpinning for modern environmental philosophy, including deep ecology.
Also being planned for offering in the spring is a new course by Prof. Greg Clingham on Landscape and Literature, 1600-1920, which will explore the development of landscape in literature in English during the modern period. In addition, English 243, in the past Bucknell’s Chaucer course, is being retooled for a special edition this spring with an environmental literary studies/philosophical focus, under the title “’Elvish Writing’: Chaucer, Spenser, and Early English Phenomenology,” to be taught by Prof. Siewers.
