NCSS 700G / LAS C700 / GRAD 700G

This course introduces students to important authors, texts, topics, theories, and conversations in the environmental humanities. Students will carefully read and discuss a range of theoretical texts centered on questions of nature and the environment. Readings are likely to include eco-phenomenologies, thing theories, critical animal studies, slow violence, queer ecologies, and the geological turn, among other topics. The activity of close engagement with theoretical material will enable students to consider how texts encourage particular forms of comprehension and interaction with the environment, and to interrogate the intellectual and material consequences that accrue from particular ways of conceptualizing natureculture. As a required course in the first semester of the NCSS MA degree, the course creates a common vocabulary and experience for all NCSS MA students. The course can also be taken as a stand-alone seminar by non-major graduate students. Run as a seminar, students will engage in weekly discussions of course readings and complete regular writing assignments and complete regular writing assignments, and complete independent research related to the discussions, topics, readings, and other activities of the course.

Major Requirement | MA Nature-Cultures-Sustainability Studies