Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Perhaps my most important task as a teacher, writer, and researcher is to help cultivate the “plurality” of which Arendt speaks: we create a common world as we share and reflect together on our unique, embodied relationships to it. This connection of worldliness and plurality is especially true for our relations to the more-than-human world. By developing a deeply situated understanding of the multispecies communities of which we are a part, we can appear to one another to discuss them, and by holding our perceptions and experiences up to the views of multiple others, we can truly understand both our situatedness and our relatedness.
Recent courses
ENVS 6149 — Culture and Environment
This course introduces students to the growing interdisciplinary field of Environmental Cultural Studies. In this course, students will critically examine how “culture” and cultural practices contribute to our understandings of nature, place, space, environmental issues, and our relation to the nonhuman. Particular attention will be given to how key concepts in cultural studies, such as power, identity, gender, race, language and representation, interact with environmental thought and contemporary environmental debates.
ENVS 4100 — Environmental Literatures
Explores the role of literature and literary criticism (including ecocriticism) in interpreting, creating, and transforming environmental discourse and politics. It will take up questions concerning the historical development of environmental and nature writing, and will explore a variety of contemporary genres that call older traditions to account.
ENVS 3320 — Sex, Gender, Nature
This course acquaints students with literature and advocacy that celebrates 'intersections' between women/gender and nature. Attention is given to various approaches, and biological, social, cultural and spiritual perceptions, through course activities involving experience, reflection, creative representation, reading, discussion, and writing.
This course introduces students to a range of modes of writing in Environmental Studies. In the process of reading, discussing, and practicing different kinds of environmental writing, students will develop a variety of writing skills in addition to an appreciation of writing as an important form of environmental action. The course also considers writing in relation to oral traditions and newer technologies.
ENVS 1800 — Environmental Writing
ENVS 5103 — Nature and Society
ENVS 2327 — In/humanities
Examination of conceptions of nature found in the Western tradition. A particular emphasis is placed on the role of cultural narratives, and notions of technology and time in shaping our conceptions of nature.
This foundational, interdisciplinary course introduces students to critical perspectives on environmental justice based in history, art, literature, philosophy, and related humanistic social sciences. In addition to its substantive focus on cultural, conceptual, and historical dimensions of environmental in/justice, the course emphasizes the development of critical reading, thinking, and writing skills.