NEW FALL 2020 MALAS SEMINAR! The Environmental Humanities with Professor Diana Leong (Also English 626)

ENGL 626 
The Environmental Humanities
Method, Meaning, and Matter 
Dr. Diana Leong | Wednesdays | 4 to 6:40pm |  EBA-445 

As an analytical framework and an area for interdisciplinary research, the environmental humanities engage a diverse set of concerns pertaining to the representation and theorization of nature. While environmental considerations have long been of interest to humanities scholars, this interest did not coalesce into a coherent field until the early 2000’s. During this period, developments in science and technology, combined with an expansion of environmental precarity, forcefully revealed the limitations of our previous concepts of nature. The challenges of analyzing the increasingly unpredictable behavior of non-human objects (e.g., weather patterns or pesticides), while attending to the uneven distribution of environmental risks and resources, called for new reading and writing practices. This course will follow recent developments in the environmental humanities as they respond to the ecological challenges of our current moment. We will begin by examining some of the foundational texts of the environmental humanities (i.e., method), before tracking their embrace of the postcolonial and anti-racist approaches central to environmental justice (i.e., meaning). We will conclude with an investigation of the field’s turn towards posthumanism, animal studies, and the new materialisms (i.e., matter). By reflecting on some of the major influences on ecocritical thought, we will aim for more nuanced understandings of how human activity both relates to and creates the natural world. 

Diana Leong is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Her research interests include environmental justice, Black literature and culture, and the environmental humanities (e.g. posthumanism, science and technology studies, animal studies, new materialisms). She is currently completing a monograph, Against Wind and Tide: Toward a Slave Ship Ecology, that theorizes the slave ship as a site for the material and imaginative convergence of environmental justice and abolitionism. Her work has also appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Electronic Book Review, and the Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature.