Mapping Common Ground

Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities

Ecocriticism and environmental history both seek to understand the relationship between human beings and their natural environments, and they understand this to be a task that requires an interdisciplinary approach. Nevertheless, thus far actual engagement between these two disciplines has occurred only sporadically and at the margins. The premise of this workshop is that both can benefit from resituating their scholarly efforts within the broader interdisciplinary framework of what is coming to be called “the environmental humanities.”

Our aims are to identify areas of research where closer interdisciplinary cooperation between literary and historical scholarship concerned with environmental issues will be particularly fruitful; to formulate a set of concerns or basic assumptions shared by both fields; and to discuss to what extent their respective methods and conceptual vocabularies can complement each other. In the course of the workshop, the participants prepared a draft for a position paper summarizing the results of their discussions, which they will continue to work on during the autumn.

Left to right: Libby Robin (KTH), Kate Rigby (Monash University), Agnes Kneitz (RCC), Susanna Lidström (KTH), Shane McCorristine (Cambridge U), Dana Phillips (U of Towson), Isabel Perez (KTH), Adeline Johns-Putra (U of Surrey) and Marco Armiero (KTH). And Hannes Bergthaller (U of Taiwan) behind the camera.

Dana and Libby