Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Etienne Benson, Director of Department II, Knowledge Systems and Collective Life, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany (formerly Associate Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania), presented his book  Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms  (University of Chicago Press, 2020) in...

Lesley Green, Professor of Anthropology and founding director of Environmental Humanities South at University of Cape Town (South Africa), presented her book  Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa  (Duke University Press, 2020) on Monday, October 12, 2020, in our Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series. In  Rock | Water | Life  Green exami...

Kate Rigby, Alexander von Humboldt Professor at University of Cologne, Germany (previously Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University), gave a Greenhouse book talk on her book  Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization  (Bloomsbury, 2020) on Monday, October 5, 2020. The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their i...

Luke Keogh, Senior Curator at the National Wool Museum (Australia), presented his book  The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World  (University of Chicago Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 28 September 2020. In our technologically advanced and globalized contemporary world, it is easy to forget that not l...

Jennifer Telesca, Assistant Professor of environmental justice at the Pratt Institute (USA), presented her new book  Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna  (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 21 September 2020. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is...

Melody Jue, Associate Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara (USA), presented her book  Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater  (Duke University Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 14 September 2020. In  Wild Blue Media , Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of...

Rocio Gomez, Assistant Professor in Latin American History at Virginia Commonwealth University (USA), presented her new book  Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835-1946  (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 7 September 2020. In Mexico environmental struggles have been fought since...

Daniel Macfarlane, Associate Professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University (USA), launched his book Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy and Engineers at the World's Most Famous Waterfall (UBC Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 31 August 2020. Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Fa...

Thom van Dooren, Associate Professor at University of Sydney (Australia), presented his book  The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds  (Columbia University Press, 2019) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 24 August 2020. Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from de...

Emily Wanderer, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Pittsburgh (USA), presented her book  The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico  (University of California Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 17 August 2020. The Life of a Pest  tracks the work practices of scientists in Mexico as the...

Paul Huebener, Associate Professor of English at Athabasca University (Canada), presented his book  Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis  in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 15 June 2020. The environmental crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of time. From the distress cries of birds that no longer know wh...

Emily Pawley, Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College (USA), discussed her book  The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science and Capitalism in the Antebellum North  (University of Chicago Press, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 8 June 2020. The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting t...

David Fedman, Assistant Professor of history at the University of California, Irvine (USA), discussed his book  Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea  (University of Washington Press, 2020) in our Greenhouse online environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 1 June 2020. Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management p...

Christine Eriksen, Senior Lecturer in geography, and Susan Ballard, Senior Lecturer in art history, from the University of Wollongong (Australia) presented their jointly authored book  Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants, and People  (Palgrave, 2020) in our Greenhouse online book series on Monday, 25 May 2020. Through a truly interdisplinary study, this book explores how fire, plants and p...

Angela Cassidy, Lecturer in Science & Technology Studies at University of Exeter, discussed her book  Vermin, Victims and Disease: British Debates over Bovine Tuberculosis and Badgers  (Palgrave, 2019) in our Greenhouse online book talk series on Monday, 18 May. This open access book provides the first critical history of the controversy over whether to cull wild badgers to control the spread...

Author and environmental historian Jessica J. Lee discussed her book  Two Trees Make a Forest  (Virago Books, 2019) on Monday, 11 May in our Greenhouse book talk series. Between tectonic plates and conflicting cultures, Taiwan is an island of extremes: high mountains, exposed flatlands, thick forests. After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather’s life, written on the cusp of his...

Antony Adler, Research Associate at Carleton College (USA), presented his book  Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea  (Harvard University Press, 2019) on Monday, 4 May in our Greenhouse online book series. We have long been fascinated with the oceans, seeking “to pierce the profundity” of their depths. In studying the history of marine science, we also learn about ours...

Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University (USA), discussed her book  Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait  (WW Norton, 2019) in our Greenhouse online book talk series on Monday, 27 April. Floating Coast  offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationships between capitalism, communism, and Arctic ec...

Eva Haifa Giraud, Lecturer in Media Studies at Keele University (UK), discussed her book  What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion  (Duke University Press, 2019) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 20 April 2020. By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities...

Paul Merchant, Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at University of Bristol (UK), presented  Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human  (University Press of Florida, 2020) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 13 April 2020. Merchant co-edited the volume with Lucy Bollington, who is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Film at Un...

Jeremy Zallen, Assistant Professor history at Lafayette College (USA), discussed his new book American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 in our Greenhouse environmental humanities online book talk series on Monday, 6 April at 15:00 CET. The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simp...

We continue our online environmental humanities book talks for our second episode with Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History, University of Stavanger, Norway, presenting her book Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (MIT Press, 2019) on Monday, 30 March 2020. This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to exami...

During the COVID days of digital communication and physical distancing, we decided to support environmental humanities scholarship that has been temporarily effected. To this end, we launched a new series of online book talks by authors of environmental humanities books. We will have talks every Monday afternoon that are online. Everyone is welcome to join the event to hear and ask questions. In o...