The colleges and universities included in this listing provide a useful starting point, but they should by no means be considered the only schools whose programs are receptive to scholarship in literature and environment and the environmental humanities.
Bath Spa University
Building on its long-standing strength in literature and environment, Bath Spa University is now offering an innovative interdisciplinary taught MA in Environmental Humanities. This programme is an opportunity to acquire new research skills, as you discover the challenges and rewards of integrating highly varied methodologies, resulting in more holistic forms of knowledge and understanding. Core modules taught by leading specialists, such as Sian Sullivan (environmental anthropology), Owain Jones (post-human geography) and Richard Kerridge (ecocriticism and nature writing), offer intensive introductions to new disciplinary perspectives, while maintaining a critical focus on key ideas such as the proposition that Earth has now entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which human activities are altering the planet in ways that will leave their mark for millennia.
The programme is designed for flexibility, offering a wide palette of elective modules that will also enable you both to learn new approaches and to consolidate your expertise in a particular discipline such as geography, literary studies, philosophy, ethics and religion, environmental studies, or conservation. A significant research project or creative practice component makes this a personally as well as intellectually transformative course which is very much yours to mould to your own needs through module and dissertation choices. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research methods training will enable you to continue on to doctoral studies in either the humanities or social sciences; alternatively, you can consolidate your creative practice by undertaking electives in areas such as creative writing or film-making, and your major project can take the form of either an academic dissertation or a creative work. Bath Spa also offers PhDs in the Environmental Humanities, as well as in subfields, such as environmental literary studies, environmental philosophy and )post)human geography.
Bread Loaf School of English
Although only offering undergraduate programs during the regular academic year, Middlebury College also runs the Bread Loaf School of English for six weeks every summer. The School of English (like its sister program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference) was founded in 1920 at a lovely Victorian resort in the Green Mountains. Robert Frost taught and gave readings at Bread Loaf for many years. Faculty are annually drawn from many of the world’s leading graduate programs in English. In addition to the Vermont campus (the Mother Loaf), Bread loaf has campuses at Oxford University, Santa Fe, and Asheville. Students can attend any or all of these branches over the five years of their work toward an MA. Faculty in the area of eco-criticism who have taught at the School of English have included Lawrence Buell, John Elder, Rochelle Johnson and Mark Long.
University of British Columbia Okanagan (Kelowna, BC, Canada)
Situated in the only region of Canada with a Mediterranean climate and semi-arid shrub steppe biome, UBC Okanagan is also the newer campus (founded 2005) of the University of British Columbia. In recognition of our location on the traditional unceded territory of the Sylix Okanagan people, the university is strongly committed to Indigenous reconciliation. Undergraduate applicants can access a range of courses in ecocriticism and critical animal studies through the BA degree, or enrol in the Environmental Humanities concentration of the Bachelor of Sustainability (BSust) degree. The BSust combines a set of interdisciplinary core courses, taught by faculty from across the campus, with optional and elective courses suited to the student’s concentration. Our graduate programs include the MA English, which focuses on Literature and Place, and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Sustainability theme, which admits MA, MSc and PhD students.
Core faculty members in ecocriticism include Greg Garrard (contemporary literature, animal studies, eco-pedagogy), Astrida Neimanis (eco-feminist philosophy, cultural studies), Jodey Castricano (critical animal studies) and Heather Latimer (biopolitics, STS, gender and women’s studies). IGS faculty include colleagues from Indigenous studies, environmental history and sociology, and media arts. Course offerings include ‘Climate Fiction’, ‘Writing Pollution’, ‘Posthumanism and Critical Animal Studies’, ‘Dog Tales’, and ‘In Pursuit of the Whale’, a site-specific course offered at Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on Vancouver Island.
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis has several PhD faculty in English literature dedicated to literature, the environment, science, biology and related matters such as animality. They include Hsuan Hsu, Tobias Meneley, Colin Milburn, Elizabeth C. Miller, Margaret Ronda and Michael Ziser. The department has a large number of MA and PhD students doing work in ecological criticism.
University of California Los Angeles
The UCLA English Department offers a PhD in English and includes several scholars who have done significant work in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities:
In addition, UCLA has broad strengths in environmental studies and environmental sciences, including at the interdisciplinary Institute of Environment and Sustainability.
University of California, Santa Barbara
The English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara offers graduate and undergraduate specializations in Literature and the Environment. We have faculty working in literature and the environment from the early Renaissance through the 21st century, including Elizabeth Cook, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Ken Hiltner, Melody Jue, and Teresa Shewry. We explore environmental issues through varied methodological and cultural approaches, with such emphases as non-human/human relations, oceanic studies, environmental justice, and environmental media.
UC Santa Barbara has exceptional strengths in interdisciplinary environmental research, including a major university initiative in the environmental humanities and social sciences. The Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI) fosters and consolidates the diverse environmental humanities programing that takes place at UC Santa Barbara. Students may also complete the Interdepartmental PhD Emphasis in Environment and Society. The goal of the PhD Emphasis in Environment and Society is to provide UCSB doctoral students training and mentorship in interdisciplinary environmental studies and sciences beyond the scope of their normal degree programs. For more information, see http://environment.english.ucsb.edu, http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu, and http://www.es.ucsb.edu/phd.
California State University, Fullerton Masters of Science program in Environmental Studies
Ours is one of the longest-running Environmental Studies programs in the nation (over 50 years old), with an excellent placement record of students working in careers including environmental consulting, habitat restoration, forestry, museums, environmental education, public administration, and more. We have a wide range of teaching faculty from across the university, focused advising, a broad network of alumni, flexible evening classes, a diverse student body, and a strong sense of community. Interested students can view our website, our Instagram page, or this 7-minute video featuring our alumni. Questions can be addressed to enst_advisor@fullerton.edu. April 1 is the application deadline for 2023.
Chatham University MFA in Creative Writing
Chatham University’s MFA focusing on nature, environment and travel writing is the premier graduate program for nurturing creative writers interested in the environmental imagination and place-based writing. The program is inspired by the work of Chatham alumna, Rachel Carson, a creative writer whose work demonstrates both lyricism and social conscience. The heart of the program—nature, environmental and travel writing—honors Carson’s legacy, but expands the interpretation of environment to include any place-based writing and all genres-poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction-shaped by human relationship with place. In addition to plentiful creative writing workshops and craft courses in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, screenwriting and children’s writing, our unique MFA program includes instruction in nature and environmental writing, travel writing, and field seminars focused on the literature of wild, urban, and rural landscapes. Each year creative writing field seminars offer students the opportunity to travel to the United States and other parts of the world with faculty and generate creative work about the experience. Past and current field seminars include trips to Costa Rica, New Zealand, Greece, India, New Orleans and western Pennsylvania.
Students are given lots of time to write at Chatham: they take twelve hours of literary craft courses (workshops that focus on style, form and literary traditions) and nine hours of advanced writing workshops in addition to one field seminar, which is a traveling writing workshop. We offer regular seminars on topics such as Wilderness and Literature, Ecofeminism, Nature and Culture, Women and Nature, and The Environmental Imagination. Students also have the opportunity to work on The Fourth River, Chatham’s literary journal of nature and place-based writing, and to participate in an internship for an environmental or literary arts organization. The Rachel Carson Institute and the energetic literary and arts scene in Pittsburgh offer opportunities for students to collaborate with other groups and present their work in public venues should they wish.
City Universities of New York (CUNY)
Studying ecocriticism in the middle of Manhattan may seem counter-intuitive, if not altogether strange; however, there are professors in the PhD Program in English, and in related programs, that are very supportive of students working in the field. A short list of recent courses include David Harvey (Anthropology) “Geographic Thought and Theory”; Peter Hitchcock (English), “Postcolonial Space”; Gerhard Joseph (English), “Aestheticizing Science”; Joan Richardson (English), “American Aesthetics”; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (English), “How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials”; Neil Smith (Anthropology), “Politics of the Spatial Present”; and Alan Vardy (English), “Romantic Poetry.” Research Centers supportive of environmental studies at the Graduate Center include The Americas Center on Science and Society, The Center for Human Environments, and The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.
Western Colorado University MFA in Nature Writing (low-residency)
Western’s MFA and M.A. in Nature Writing seeks to empower writers who care about the urgent and wonder-filled world. The program is founded on the core belief that writing can be an agent of change, that creativity engenders solutions, and that writers should be mentored to achieve their highest artistic goals. The program encourages all genres—memoir, essay, fiction, poetry, hybrid, and experimental forms. Through extensive reading, rigorous intellectual inquiry, workshopping, and creative writing, students leave the program with polished short and long form work. Faculty are highly published and are equally dedicated teachers. As a low-residency program, students can continue to live and work where they choose. Instead, classes are held via weekly zooms, online discussions, and a summer residency in Gunnison, Colorado. The program welcomes not only creative writers, but those in environmental studies programs and from other academic backgrounds. Indeed, we encourage all to participate in the lively contemporary conversation of place-based writing.
Coventry University
Coventry University (UK) has introduced a new (2021) MA English Literature programme. All of the modules are concerned with literature and the environment, space and place, globalism and regionality, climate justice and more.
University of Cumbria
Our innovative taught MA in Literature, Romanticism and the English Lake District offers a unique opportunity to study a wide range of literary material within a geographical landscape which has been a source of inspiration to generations of writers. The MA is taught at the University of Cumbria’s Ambleside campus in the heart of the Lake District National Park, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Not only has the landscape of the English Lake District been a source of literary inspiration, it is now also perceived as a ‘cradle’ for ecological thinking, with writers from the eighteenth century to the present using their responses to this landscape to think about the complex relationship between human inhabitants and the natural environment. On our MA you will consider the powerful role played by literature in our conceptualisations of place and in our understanding of the natural world, in texts spanning over 200 years: from poetry to fiction, from children’s literature to travel writing, and from theoretical texts to creative non-fiction. Our MA makes the most of the landscape in which it is taught with immersive fieldtrips to literary locations, both those at the centre of the Lake District tourist industry – such as the landscapes and homes of William Wordsworth – as well as those on the industrial and coastal edgelands of Cumbria, which have inspired very different kinds of imaginative responses. During your studies you will also engage in manuscript work with curatorial staff at Wordsworth Grasmere and you will have the opportunity to take part in work experience visits within the Cultural Heritage sector. For further details about the MA, visit our website or email the programme leader, Dr Penny Bradshaw (Penelope.bradshaw@cumbria.ac.uk).
Eastern Oregon University
Eastern Oregon University announced the launch in 2021 of a new low-residency writing MFA with a concentration in Wilderness, Ecology, and Community (WEC). In addition to ongoing online learning during the academic year, at the heart of the program are two summer residencies that entail a week at the Fishtrap Writers’ Conference followed by, in alternate years, a week backpacking in the Wallowa Mountains or studying sustainability and writing in a Northwest urban center. A full program description and curriculum outline can be found here: https://www.eou.edu/mfa/wilderness-writing-concentration-overview/. The application deadline for the first cohort is March 29, 2021. EOU’s MFA director David Axelrod and Nick Neely are among the core faculty, please contact them with questions.
University of Glasgow
This Masters in Environment, Culture & Communication is concerned with the relationships we hold with our ‘wild’ environments, and how these evolved from the C18 to the present. You will develop knowledge of environmental debates from both cultural and scientific perspectives, and learn to communicate environmental issues using a variety of tools and strategies. Based at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies – the University of Glasgow’s rural campus – students will take courses in environmental humanities, politics and communication. In addition, they will elect to take a number of courses including environmental ethics and climate change, and the ways in which technology has shaped environments – and how it might do so in the future. Sharing classes with peers from their sister course Environmental Science, Technology & Society, students on this interdisciplinary programme will examine key issues from a variety of perspectives. Field trips are an essential part of the programme, and students will experience the Scottish environment – in both tourist areas and off the beaten track locations – as a living laboratory for reading and writing the environment. The programme culminates in students electing to write either an academic dissertation on a topic of their choice, or in their taking a placement option to undertake research in an environmental organisation. The key contact is Programme Convenor Dr. David Borthwick (david.borthwick@glasgow.ac.uk), who welcomes expressions of interest from students across the world.
Hacettepe University—Ankara, Turkey
The Department of English Language and Literature of Hacettepe University has two graduate programs, offering MA and PhD courses on “British Cultural Studies” and “ English Literature.” The department has one PhD course in Cultural Studies graduate program focusing on environmental and cultural issues, Culture and the Environment. This course offers an advanced critical outlook on social and cultural ecology, environmental ethics and philosophy as well as ecocriticism. Other courses such as Post-colonial British Culture and Literature, and Colonial British Culture and Literature also offer perspectives on ecological imperialism and environmental colonialism. Related course offerings include British Travel Literature, British Commonwealth Literatures; Contemporary Literary Theory and Criticism; Utopian Thought in English Literature, Contemporary Philosophical Trends, and Shakespeare courses. The recently founded English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey (IDEA), which organizes international conferences each year, also enables scholars to present papers on ecocriticism and on the relations between literature and the environment.
University of Idaho
Located in the beautiful rolling hills of the Palouse, the University of Idaho’s English department is home to many MA faculty with “green” and/or place-based interests, including MA faculty Anna Banks, Erin James, Jan Johnson, Jennifer Ladino, Jodie Nicotra, and Scott Slovic, and MFA faculty Kim Barnes and Bob Wrigley. Our graduate students receive mentoring from top-notch scholars and writers in an intimate intellectual environment. MA seminars, which are taken by both MFA and MA students, reflect faculty expertise in ecocinema, ecopoetics, animal studies, affect theory, narrative theory, urban space, postcolonial ecocriticism, Western American literature, American Indian Studies, interdisciplinary ecocritical theory, and international environmental literature. They also hosted the 2015 ASLE conference.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
The doctoral program in Literature and Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania is unique because, in addition to the usual academic-year program, the department offers a summers-only option for established teachers. Author of the award-winning biography Edward Abbey: A Life and the 2008 College English article “Teaching Hometown Literature: a Pedagogy of Place,” Professor James M. Cahalan is the doctoral program’s leading specialist in ecocriticism and related fields. He has directed several dissertations in these areas. In addition, Professor Susan Comfort teaches about environmental justice issues and Professor Christopher Kuipers offers courses on the pastoral tradition.
Indiana University, Bloomington
IU-Bloomington offers a minor in Science and Literature, and has several faculty members who have demonstrated interests in science, the environment, animality and nature writing. Celebrated poet Ross Gay is a member of the English faculty. Faculty also include Byron Santangelo, author of Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology; and Christoph Irmscher, whose many books include explorations of early American nature writing–Irmscher has also produced the 1999 Library of American edition of Audobon’s writings and drawings; Richard Nash, whose current work explores the pedigree of thoroughbred horses and who has edited a special issue of the journal Configurations on animality and animal studies; creative writers Scott Russell Sanders (emeritus) and Alyce Miller, who hosted the “Kindred Spirits” conference on animals, law and ethics; The English department has at various times organized a Science and Literature Affinity group, and several faculty members and graduate students usually attend the Society for Literature, Science and Arts (SLSA) annual conference. Recent graduate courses of interest include “The Place of Poetry”; “Postcards for a New Millennium: Science Fiction as Literary/Scientific Speculation”; “Animality in the 18th Century”; and the core course for the minor, “Literature and Science.”
University of Iowa
The English department at the University of Iowa includes a group of professors with an interest in literature and environment: Florence Boos, Barbara Eckstein, Laura Rigal, Philip Round, Claire Sponsler. Recent course offerings in related areas include Reading Place and Scale, Culture and Nature, Medieval Environments, Readings in Indigenous Theory, and Ecological Anthropology. University of Iowa Press publishes a special series entitled “American Land and Life,” emphasizing works on place and environment. Writers, scholars, and activists who have presented at the university or in the Iowa City area recently include Ted Steinberg, Jacques Leslie, Nancy Langston, Michael Pollan, Barry Lopez, Paula Gunn Allen, Timothy Beatley, and many others. A graduate reading group for students interested in place / environment was started in 2007.
Iowa State University
Iowa State University’s three-year program leading to the terminal MFA degree, emphasizes creative writing—poetry, fiction and nonfiction—about the environment. The MFA program offers an original and intensive opportunity for gifted students of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama to document, meditate on, celebrate, and mourn the transformation of our world. From the Sumerian and Homeric hymns to the Theogony and the Odyssey, from Noah to Moby Dick, from Black Elk to Black Boy, from Virginia Woolf to Tobias Wolff, the literary arts acknowledge an inherent connection between the human predicament and place. With more people sharing our planet’s finite space, and with our planet and its systems imperiled, an educated attention to place in the broadest sense of the term is vital. The human story finds its structure in geography, both natural and constructed, and in the complex landscape of cultural constructs.
Kansas State University
KSU offers an MA in English with various tracks: creative writing, cultural studies, literature, children’s literature, or composition and rhetoric. Students can pursue environmental or ecocritical interests in all these tracks. The English Department participates in a Long-term Ecological Reflection Program tied to the Division of Biology’s Long-term Ecological Research Program on Konza Prairie, sponsoring environmental writers and speakers. Faculty with particular interest in environmental literature and writing include Elizabeth Dodd (creative writing, American literature), Donna Potts (Irish and American literature, poetry), Michael Donnelly (Milton, 18th century, American nature writing), Carol Franko (utopian and dystopian fiction), James Machor (early and 19th century American literature, cultural studies, critical theory). In addition, the program encourages students to take a class outside the English department; students can pursue coursework with environmental emphases in History, Sociology, Geography, and other related fields.
Environmental Studies Certificate Program at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
The Environmental Studies Certificate Program provides LMU students from all disciplines with the opportunity to gain an additional interdisciplinary qualification in environmental studies. The certificate course runs in parallel to students´ degree studies. Its international and interdisciplinary format and the workshops and lectures delivered by environmental researchers from all over the globe make this program one of a kind in Germany. The program is an initiative of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and LMU Munich. For more information please visit our website: http://www.en.envstudies.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/certificate_program/index.html
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan offers the PhD in English Language & Literature; English & Women’s Studies; English & Education; and a graduate certificate program in Science, Technology, & Society. Michigan has a highly regarded School of Natural Resources and Environment, an active environmental law program at the Law School and strong presences in environmental history, cultural anthropology, and ecology. Several English department faculty are interested in ecocriticism, history of science, and related fields, including Susan Scott Parrish, Susan Najita, Gregg Crane, Petra Kuppers, Guarav Desai, Alihah Khan, Suriya Nair, and Antoine Traisnel; in History, John Carson, Phil DeLoria, Paolo Squatriti, Alexandra Stern and Matt Lassiter; and in cultural anthropology, Tom Fricke. In addition, the Graham and Erb Institutes support research in environmental fields.
Michigan State University
Offering an MA and PhD in English and American Studies, Michigan State University offers a number of courses in animal studies, including sociology (Dr. Linda Kalof), English (Dr. Jennifer Fay), Philosophy (Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte, Dr. Paul Thompson) and in the Department of Animal Science (Dr. Janice Siegfried). There are also several Environmental Science and Policy courses offered each semester.
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
The Department of English at UMTC offers an M.A. and Ph.D. in English, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Faculty with interests related to nature and the environment include Dan Philippon, Kim Todd, Tim Brennan, Rebecca Krug, and Ray Gonzalez. Recent courses include “Transatlantic Environmental Humanities,” “The Environmental Imagination in 19th-Century America,” “Whose Nature? The Environment in Humanistic Inquiry,” and “Ecocriticism and American Literature.” Many allied centers also exist at UMTC, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the Institute on the Environment, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, as well as many allied graduate programs, including American Studies, Communication Studies, Conservation Sciences, Geography, Germanic Studies, Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication, and the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Located on the Mississippi River, and named one of the country’s best cities for biking, Minneapolis offers many opportunities for outdoor recreation, including at the nearby Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the North Shore of Lake Superior, and on Minnesota’s “10,000 lakes.”
University of Mississippi
The University of Mississippi offers the MA, MFA, and PhD in English. Faculty members who are especially interested in environmental literature, ecocriticism, and ecotheory include Ann Fisher-Wirth, Jay Watson, and Karen Raber. Recent environmentally-oriented, graduate-level courses include American Ecopoetry, Southern Literature and the Environment, Environmental Life Writing (creative nonfiction), and Renaissance Literature and the Environment. We have students who focus on ecopoetry for their MFA poetry theses, and on American or Renaissance environmental topics for dissertations. The University of Mississippi’s Center for Southern Studies also offers rich opportunities for research and study in all aspects of the Southern environment. And, since the University is actively developing campus-wide environmental initiatives as well as undergraduate courses in the field, graduate students will be able to be involved with community development and with teaching.
University of Montana
The Environmental Studies Program is accepting applications for Autumn 2018. For nearly 50 years, they have provided students with the literacy, skills, and commitment needed to create a more sustainable, equitable, and peaceful world. Deadline is January 15, 2018. The Environmental Studies Program (EVST) at the University of Montana in Missoula offers a flexible, interdisciplinary Masters degree with a thesis or portfolio focus in creative environmental nonfiction. Professor Phil Condon directs the overall EVST Program as well as the Writing focus, and he offers an environmental writing workshop and a seminar in the Literature of Nature Writing annually. Other EVST faculty teach courses in diverse content areas, including sustainable agriculture, water ecology, and environmental justice, humanities, law, and knowledge of native peoples. Each year, a nationally known Kittredge Visiting Environmental Writer leads a graduate writing course and 2nd-year grad students also attend the Environmental Writing Institute. Graduate writing students publish Camas: The Nature of the West, a biannual literary environmental journal, participate in the annual Wild Mercy community reading series, and take relevant courses in many other departments, including English, History, Philosophy, Journalism, Forestry, and Biological Sciences.
MA in Literature with an “Ecocriticism” option: The University of Montana English Department now offers an innovative new option in Ecocriticism. The option is for students interested in how literature shapes our understanding of the environment and vice-versa. In addition to courses required for all MA Literature students, those who pursue the Ecocriticism option will take core upper-division coursework in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (LIT 422), along with seminars in Literature, Nature and Politics (LIT 524) and Special Topics in Ecocriticism (LIT 502). A rich variety of upper-division electives in the Literature(s) of Place, Nature Writing in British and American Literature, and Ecology in Non-Western Literary Traditions will also be available to students pursing the Ecocriticism option. The option is designed to prepare students who intend to pursue Ph.D. work in Literature and the Environment and/or to assist those who wish to incorporate a concern for ecological and social justice issues within their pedagogy.
Undergraduate Option in Literature and Environment: The University of Montana English Department is pleased to offer an exciting new option in Literature and the Environment. The option is for students interested in literary expression that addresses the human relationship to our more-than-human world. The body of work encompassed by Literature and Environment includes oral and written “texts” spanning diverse cultural traditions through millennia of human experience. Though differing greatly in the kinds of rhetorical strategies they deploy, these “texts” share a common interest in fundamental ontological and ethical questions and the social and environmental implications of our answers to them. The many approaches to this body of literature, under the rubric of Ecocriticism, engage students in vital inquiry, an exploration of sustaining and sustainable aesthetic and environmental relationships.
Montana Tech of the University of Montana
Montana Tech offers a Master of Science degree in technical communication in its Professional & Technical Communication Department. Students may select courses that emphasize environmental issues including, “Seminar in Technology, Communication & Culture,” “Communicating Environmental and Health Risk,” “Intercultural Communication,” and “Rhetorical Theories & Professional Communication.” Additionally, students may arrange for independent study courses that cover environmental issues. The thirty-one credit hours for the Master’s degree include a thesis, project, or publishable article, any of which may be focused on environmental concerns and issues. Faculty members with research and scholarly interests in environmental topics include Dr. Patrick Munday, Dr. Henrietta Shirk, and Chad Okrusch. Butte is a historically rich small town in the Northern Rocky Mountains, surrounded by unrivalled four-season outdoor recreational opportunities.
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
The English Department at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln is developing an emerging specialization in place-conscious and ecocritical studies, including MA and PhD opportunities in literary studies, creative writing, and composition and rhetoric. While we are rooted in our Great Plains region, and build on a long institutional commitment to Great Plains Studies, our “place-conscious” offerings and ecocritical studies courses cover a wide variety of topics and places. Affiliated faculty include Robert Brooke, Joy Castro, Barbara DiBernard, Tom Gannon, Fran Kaye, Tom Lynch and Mary K. Stillwell.Graduate courses recently taught include a Seminar in Ecocriticism and Nature Writing, a Seminar in Native American Ecofeminism, a course in Nature in 19th-Century American Literature, Place-conscious Teaching, Rhetoric: Place-conscious Writing, Place-conscious Literary Studies: U.S. West-Australian Outback and Great Plains Literature. Associated institutions include the Nebraska Writing Project, the Center for Great Plains Studies, the Plains Humanities Alliance, Prairie Schooner, the Cather Project, and the Walt Whitman Archives.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD Program in Italian Studies
Graduate Advisor: Serenella Iovino, Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities (serenella.iovino@unc.edu). Italian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is currently accepting applications to the PhD Program for the 2020/2021 academic year.
Italy emerges from its contrasts: one language and dozens of dialects; age-old literature and culture and the burgeoning creativity of the local vis-à-vis the global; world-famous landscapes and culinary traditions and traumas of wars, political crises, and environmental disasters. It emerges from art, history, politics, philosophy, a crossroads of Mediterranean voices, civilizations, and migrations. Building on this complexity and embracing a trans-historical perspective, the Graduate Program in Italian Studies considers Italy at the confluence of cultures, territories, and imagination to be seen through multiple lenses. The environmental humanities is a core-approach of the program. Drawing on ecocriticism and all the major fields of critical ecological culture (from landscapes ethics and urban ecology to food studies, from posthumanism and new materialisms to the Anthropocene debate), our goal is to build a creative critical discourse that elicits differences, pluralities, hybridizations, conflicts, and encounters, thus positioning Italian Studies within the broader horizon of this debate. Webpage: https://romancestudies.unc.edu/graduate/grad-programs/italian/
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
The PhD program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro regularly offers coursework and independent studies in Literature/Rhetoric and the Environment. Faculty members interested in this specialization include Karen L. Kilcup (American Literature), Risa Applegarth (Rhetoric and Composition), and Nancy Myers (Rhetoric and Composition). Faculty interests include: environmental justice and human rights, literacy and ethnography, race and gender studies, sacred places, ecofeminism, globalism, and bioregionalism. The program offers opportunities for service learning. In addition, students can benefit from faculty across the University who participate in the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program.
Northern Michigan University
Northern Michigan University, located on the shores of Lake Superior and on the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe Three Fires Confederacy, offers an M.A. in English with a new concentration in Literature and the Environment. Students in this concentration study ecocriticism, environmental literature, and nature writing and have the option of taking concentration electives in fields outside of English, including Native American Studies, Environmental Studies, Communication and Media Studies, and Business. The program offers outdoor, experiential learning opportunities in one of the country’s most stunning landscapes led by active scholars and writers who work at the intersection of art and environment, nature and narrative. These faculty include Jon Billman (Nature Writing, Nonfiction Writing), Dr. Amy Hamilton (Ecocriticism, Western American Literature, Native American Literature), Dr. Patricia Killelea (Native American Literature, Poetry), Dr. Caroline Krzakowski (Modern British Literature, Gardening), Dr. Lesley Larkin (Science and Literature, African American Literature), Dr. Rachel May (Material Culture, Cartography and Literature, Nonfiction Writing), Dr. Russell Prather (Green Romanticism, Visual Culture), and more. The English M.A. concentration in Literature and the Environment prepares students for further academic study or for work in the large variety of fields seeking professionals who can communicate clearly about environmental issues. Additional opportunities for M.A. students include graduate assistantships with tuition remission and an annual stipend, editorial fellowships with the nationally renowned scholarly journal Western American Literature, internships at the nationally renowned literary journal Passages North, and funding for conference travel and summer research.
The Ohio State University
All PhD students in English at Ohio State design individual programs of study, and since the early 1990s several students in rhetoric and in literary studies have completed dissertations focusing on ecocriticism, working with English Department faculty who publish and teach in the area of literature and environment studies, and direct doctoral dissertations in the field. They include Sara Crosby in ecohorror and ecocriticism, and Thomas S. Davis and Amrita Dhar in environmental humanities. The English department is very supportive of interdisciplinary projects, and grad students working on ecocriticism can take courses in other departments relatively easily. Of particular interest might be Geography’s specialty area in Environment and Society and History’s Environmental History group, as well as the graduate course offerings of the School of Environment and Natural Resources and the interdisciplinary Environmental Science Program.
University of Oregon
Literature and Environment began as a focal emphasis in the UO English Department in the early 1990s, inspired by faculty member Glen Love’s 1989 call for an ecological literary criticism in his Presidential Address to the Western Literature Association. In one of the oldest ecocriticism programs in the US, Oregon’s strong graduate cohort has been a lively equal partner with faculty in creating curriculum and leading research in this rapidly expanding field. A warmly collegial atmosphere is centered around MesaVerde, a student/faculty organization that sponsors reading groups, colloquia, retreats, and social events.
The leafy UO campus is set in a friendly town full of live music venues, health food stores large and small, craft bakeries, bike paths and proximity to both the Cascade Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. A diverse organic farming community rings the town of Eugene, providing local produce at farmers’ markets and local shops from April through November. Outdoor recreation is easy to find, both in the town of Eugene with its two mountain rivers flowing through, and in the nearby wilderness areas full of trout streams and snowy peaks. Perhaps the rugged Pacific Northwest landscapes of fertile valleys and green mountains west of the Cascades and high plateau cattle ranching country to the east are responsible for the keen environmental interests of the region. The University of Oregon is one of the most environmentally active campuses in the nation, with many departments offering green curricula and much interdisciplinary collaboration.
English Department faculty and graduate students have been founding members and continue to be active in ASLE, as well as presenting their research at related national and international conferences. Graduates of the program staff environmental literature positions at colleges and universities around the US and are prominent organizers of panels at MLA, WLA, ASLE, ALA, and other professional meetings. Faculty expertise ranges from Thoreau and nineteenth-century science, to postcolonial theory and travel writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, to ecocritical cultural studies at the turn of the nineteenth century into the Modernist era; from science studies and animal studies to environmental philosophy; from concepts of nature in the Middle Ages, to colonial American ethnohistory, cartography, and naturalism; to geopolitical food policy and literature in the twentieth century.
Oregon State University
Oregon State University began offering an M.A. in Environmental Arts and Humanities in Fall 2016. Our goal is to provide students with a degree program about the cultural, moral, historical, spiritual, creative, and communication dimensions of environmental issues. The program builds upon, and adds to, the collaborative nature of faculty and student engagement across several disciplines at OSU. M.A students will graduate prepared for good, wise work in such positions as environmental NGOs, government and land agencies, advocacy groups, corporations, green business, journalism, conservation and stewardship, formal and informal education, and other environmental positions that require strong, creative communication and reasoning skill sets and humanistic understanding.
Oregon State University’s degree program is designed for students with undergraduate degrees in the arts and humanities or the environmental sciences and a deep interest in broadening their education to include arts and humanities-based perspectives and skills. In its foundation courses, the M.A. provides students a reciprocal understanding of the working methods of environmental science and environmental arts/humanities. Then it invites students to focus on one of three graduate areas of concentration. These are environmental imagination (arts, communication, creative writing, moral imagination), environmental action (community leadership, movement building, media power, cultural diversity, social justice, the history of structural change), or environmental thinking (moral reasoning, critical thinking about environmental issues, conceptual analysis of complex problems, reasoning with facts and values). Students in the M.A. program will learn these skills in the context of work in a particular area of concern, work that will include courses, collaborative field experience, and the thesis or project.
Pacifica Graduate Institute
The M.A. Engaged Humanities & Creative Life at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California is an interdisciplinary specialized program that builds upon Pacifica Graduate Institute’s unique research and teaching in depth psychological perspectives for ecologically oriented humanities disciplines (such as literature, history, philosophy, arts practice based research, art history, museum studies, cultural studies, Postcolonial studies etc.) in order to provide an enhanced integrated program adhering to recognized disciplinary and professional standards. Pacifica Graduate Institute represents a community of dedicated research scholars with decades of experience and publications in exploring and increasing creativity through traditional humanities and arts practice based research. Pacifica offers a particular focus in developing the ecological humanities, including course in advanced ecocriticism in relation to the unconscious, myth and nature-based creativity, the healing arts. The MA grows from this strong foundation of research and teaching into how creativity works with eco-perspectives in the humanities (for example from traditional scholarship to web-enhanced creative practice and embodied performance). The program extends and deepens what it means to be human in a new relationship with the non-human.
Princeton University
The Environmental Humanities Program based in the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) encourages the participation of faculty, research scholars and students from the humanities in the study of environmental subjects in order to develop well-rounded insights into environmental issues. An active grants program supports faculty-led research and the development of courses that examine environmental topics through the lens of literary traditions, philosophy, history, human rights and justice, and the arts. Seminars, lecture series and conferences in the environmental humanities promote an inclusive and challenging public dialogue on the ethical, visual, literal, and human dimensions of environmental topics, including climate ethics, environmental justice and cultural dissolution in the wake of environmental destruction.
Core faculty include Allison Carruth, author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (2013); her areas of research and teaching include contemporary literature and new media, food culture and food politics, science and technologies studies (STS), urban environmentalism, and globalization theory; and Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, his areas of research include global perspectives on environmental literature and film; environmental justice; the creative and political challenges of imagining environmental time.
Rachel Carson Center (RCC), Germany
The Doctoral Program in Environment and Society is aimed at graduates from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences who wish to research questions concerning the nature/culture/environment interface. Within the scope of the program, doctoral students acquire the ability to understand the origins and interactions of complex natural and social processes. The doctoral program brings together expertise on environmental research from university and non-university institutions in Munich. The program is based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, a joint initiative of LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum. Its stimulating research environment, intensive supervision, and opportunity to form international networks offer excellent conditions for doctoral students.
Spalding University
Spalding University’s top 10, low residency MFA in Writing program celebrates creativity and community, not competition. Residencies bring together outstanding students and faculty for 10 exhilarating days of workshop and serious craft study. Back home, students read, write, and revise during one-on-one independent study with a prize-winning, publishing mentor. The intimate exchange of ideas between mentor and mentee improves writing faster than students thought possible. Offering fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children & young adults, screenwriting, and playwriting. Faculty members who write with an interest in place-based or environmental writing are K.L Cook, Silas House, and Crystal Wilkinson (fiction); Dianne Aprile, Roy Hoffman, and Elaine Orr (creative nonfiction); Beth Bauman (writing for children & young adults); and Helena Kriel (screenwriting). For more information, email: mfa@spalding.edu.
University of North Texas
Deeply invested in interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, The University of North Texas takes pride in its numerous environmental and sustainability initiatives, as well as its commitment to addressing economic, social, and cultural environmental issues. In keeping with this mission, the English department provides undergraduate and graduate students with ample opportunities to study literature from an environmental, ecological, and/or ecocritical standpoint.
The department has been building ecocriticism as one of its focus areas and now offers courses addressing fundamental issues of this growing field of literary study (such as “Literature and the Environment”) as well as courses with a more specific focus that address particular areas of ecocritical interest (like “Chicana/o Environmental Thought”). More specifically, professors Priscilla Ybarra and Ian Finseth both have noted interests in the intersections between environmental history and environmental studies, including canonical as well as ethnic American literary traditions. Dr. Ybarra integrates more diverse approaches to the natural environment, focusing particularly on the development of Chicana/o environmental thought. Furthermore, following the work of prominent environmental scholars, Dr. Ybarra’s work problematizes certain fundamental frameworks of ecocriticism such as definitions of “nature writing” and concepts such as “wilderness.” Dr. Finseth specializes in nineteenth-century American and African American literature, with particular research interests in race, ecocrticism, science, and religious history. His first book, Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860 (University of Georgia Press, 2009), examines the role of environmental thought and images of the natural world in the debate over human bondage in the early American republic. His current book project will introduce an analysis of literary representations of ecstasy and dissociative experience, focusing on the cognitive and neurophenomenological dimensions of the human encounter with nature.
The English department also promotes interdisciplinary work more broadly. Graduate students can take advantage of courses offered by the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies which hosts the nation’s leading program in Environmental Ethics and Philosophy—home to such prominent scholars as J. Baird Callicott, Eugene Hargrove, Patricia Glazebrook, Irene Klaver, and Ricardo Rozzi—and the Center for Environmental Philosophy. Students may also take courses within the department of Anthropology, which offers a focused graduate degree in Environmental and Ecological Anthropology.
More generally, UNT’s Office of Sustainability fosters campus-wide awareness of environmental challenges while collaborating with students, faculty, staff, and administration to advance sustainable practices and behaviors, most specifically the University’s goal to achieve carbon-neutrality; and the student-run North Texas Energy and Environment Club promotes environmental awareness, hosts environmental fairs and workshops, promotes initiatives from the Office of Sustainability, and encourages student involvement in environmental issues.
Furthermore, UNT has recently partnered with numerous organizations in the North Texas region to implement numerous environmental initiatives. Such initiatives include, but are not limited to, the Waterways Project, a biennial water conference at UNT which takes an interdisciplinary approach to addressing critical water issues; the Trust for Land, which works with North Texas communities to preserve natural areas and create parklands; the Prairie and Timbers chapter of the Audubon Society, which offers programs related to wildlife, ecology, conservation, and birds; and the Cross Timbers Group of the Sierra Club, which works to protect the wild spaces of North Texas.
For more information about environmental literary studies at UNT, please feel free to contact Dr. Ybarra, Dr. Finseth, or visit the English department’s website at www.english.unt.edu.
University of Texas at Arlington
The MA and PhD in English at the University of Texas at Arlington includes graduate courses on environmentally-oriented topics and graduate students focus on nature and the environment in both their research and their teaching. Graduate faculty include Amy Tigner (the environment in Renaissance England, early modern environmental studies of landscape, land usage, and pollution); and Neill Matheson (Thoreau; nineteenth-century American literature, natural history, and anthropology; theories of the animal).
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin offers an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in fifteen fields of study including all periods of American and British literature, Ethnic & Third World literatures, Women, Gender & Literature, Cultural Studies, Digital Literacies, Poetry & Poetics, and Drama, among others. Currently there are two Ph.D. faculty doing research in the environmental humanities: Heather Houser and Allen MacDuffie.
Texas Tech University
The Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE) graduate initiative in the Department of English centers upon the most important developments in the study of the natural environment in literature. Issues of race, regionalism, and social justice have been embedded in environmental literature from its beginnings. Most of us know Thoreau wrote Walden but sometimes forget he also wrote “Civil Disobedience.” Edward Abbey’s MA thesis examined the moral implications of political violence. John Muir not only helped convince Theodore Roosevelt to found the National Park system but also wrote about the forced removal of Yosemite’s Native American inhabitants in order to turn the valley into our first wilderness park–a park which would then adopt the image of the “Indian Brave” to grace its front entrance. More recently, Carolyn Merchant has written on the connections between slavery and soil degradation in the American south. Gloria Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the borderlands originates in the geographic and psycho-social space of the U.S.-Mexico political boundary. Cherríe Moraga writes about the everyday experience of the environment for queer women of color and defines environment as home, work, food, and body. In other words, regional studies, race, ethnicity, and postcoloniality are inextricable from studies of environmental literature. Our aim with the LSJE initiative is to engage graduate students who share the desire to approach canonical, contemporary, and newly discovered historical literature through the intellectual media of these combined sensibilities. Students will revisit important texts in a new light—across political boundaries into bioregions–within environmental historical contexts. Graduate students pursuing study in LSJE will have the chance to take courses in ecocriticism, as well as race, gender, and social justice theory, and appropriate literary periods and subjects. MA students may take as many as 15 hours of coursework in such areas and write a thesis. PhD students must take at least 18 hours and can take more. Students will also have access to the Sowell Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World, one of the finest repositories of contemporary literature of natural history. They may also have the opportunity to work directly with Barry Lopez, a Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Texas Tech University. Mr. Lopez has brought exhibits to the University’s art gallery, taught workshops, and makes twice-annual visits to campus to meet with students in a wide range of disciplines.
The Undergraduate Minor in Literature, Social Justice, and the Environment (LSJE) provides a structured program that allows students to benefit from the creative possibilities of interdisciplinary research. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, LSJE minor compliments many majors and allows students to investigate course committed to empowering them as responsible and conscientious global citizens. This minor is intended to engage students with the most important contemporary developments in the study of race, gender, sexuality, global studies, and the natural environment. The program offers the freedom to explore diverse interdisciplinary approaches while developing a global consciousness rooted in a broad, yet practical understanding of the institutions that shape our human efforts. Core courses in the Department of English focus on issues of social justice within the context of specific cultures and peoples. Within the LSJE curriculum, students may further explore discourse ranging from the gendered politics of the world of sports to historical treatments of nature and identity. They may choose to focus on topics of environmental ethics, political philosophy, and international politics. The program is flexible and adaptable to each student’s needs.
The Creative Writing Program at Texas Tech University offers both the MA and PhD with emphasis in creative writing to qualified students, with a creative writing faculty whose writing and teaching interests support writing on environment and place. Creative writing faculty work on creative writing projects involving Southwestern literature/place and we encourage our students to make use of the Southwest Collections archives and materials in their research.
University of Utah
The University of Utah’s Master’s Program in Environmental Humanities is a two-year degree training the next generation of environmental leaders and thinkers. This fully-funded master’s program positions students to study climate change, resilience, advocacy and other interests in preparation for changing the world. We encourage creative and scholarly exchanges toward new forms of environmental leadership and environmental justice. Faculty include Jeffrey McCarthy, Taylor Brorby, Elizabeth Callaway, and many others.
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University’s PhD in English program offers resources for the study literature and the environment in the form of its notable faculty members Cecelia Tichi and Vera Kutzinski. Beyond the program itself, graduate students may work with Vanderbilt’s fabulous interdisciplinary faculty group for the study of Ecology and Spirituality, consisting of environmental and environmental justice advocates such as David Wood (Philosophy), Brooke Ackerly (Political Science), Beth Conklin (Anthropology), Michael Vandenbergh (Law School), and others. Research opportunities and study opportunities (and funding) also abound at Vanderbilt’s Center for the Americas, Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies, Center for Ethics, and Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.
University of Vermont, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources
The concentration in Environmental Thought and Culture in the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources is an individually-designed Master’s degree for motivated students who seek to pursue a broad and transdisciplinary curriculum of graduate work in environmental studies, with a strong foundation in the ethical and philosophical traditions that inform environmental theory and action. The concentration balances depth in the student’s research area with breadth in the range of skills and approaches required for skillful engagement with environmental issues. With its emphasis on transdisciplinary research (drawing on the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) and on critical thinking, integrative analysis, and strong written and oral communication skills, the concentration provides students with a well-rounded understanding and capacity for addressing real-world environmental issues and problems.
Applications of participating faculty members’ work have included education, critical analysis, policy, planning, organizational management and decision making, philosophy, and activism, related to such issues as sustainable community development, public lands and protected areas, tourism, forests, mining, indigenous issues, development of religious responses to environmental issues, and arts and media communication. Students will work closely with their advisors and members of their studies committee to develop a program of coursework (which may include internships) and a final project or research thesis that strengthens their understanding and professional competency in some aspect of environmental thought, study, and action. Students’ programs of study will be self-designed in close consultation with their advisor and studies committee. Final project or research theses may be applied or theoretical, and may involve such methodologies as social surveys, ethnography, action research in organizational settings, discourse and policy analysis, document research, multi-criteria assessment for environmental decisions, organizational strategy development, media or artistic communication techniques, ethical or philosophical analysis, and others.
UVM Low-residency Master’s in Leadership for Sustainability: The concentration in Leadership for Sustainability at UVM is designed for emerging leaders who are committed to deepening their capacity to catalyze change and transcend boundaries. The two-year program offers an innovative blend of intense residential and online learning experiences. The program features four residential retreats in Vermont, D.C., and the Bay Area, CA. These gatherings provide an opportunity for intensive experiential learning opportunities as well as relationship-building among cohort members and with distinguished professional affiliates. Upon completion of the program, graduates will: (1) Have a deeper relationship with nature and better understand ecological patterns, processes, and organizing principles that can inspire our leadership, design, and change-making processes; (2) Have tools to critically examine the thought patterns, assumptions, worldviews, ways of knowing, and systems and structures of power and privilege that underlie change-making and leadership efforts (including our own); (3) Have developed advanced leadership skills and practices that enhance their unique abilities and capacities to facilitate and catalyze change, advance the work of their communities and professional organizations, and create conditions for life to thrive over the long haul.
University of Victoria (Canada)
The Department of English at the University of Victoria welcomes applications from prospective MA and PhD students considering studies in literature and the environment. The department, host of the ASLE biennial conference in 2009, has particular strengths in ecocriticism, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. Our MA concentration in Literatures of the West Coast adopts a transnational approach to regional literary studies, and the department is home to many students in the university’s Cultural, Social, and Political Thought interdisciplinary graduate program.
Core faculty members in ecocriticism include Nicholas Bradley (Canadian literature, American literature, contemporary poetry), Richard Pickard (environmental nonfiction, literature before Romanticism, British Columbia literature), Sheila M. Rabillard (modern, contemporary, and Canadian drama), and Nicole Shukin (Canadian literature, cultural studies, animal studies, poststructuralist theory). Other faculty members offer further expertise in spatial theory, regionalism, travel writing, indigenous studies, and other relevant fields. In the last few years, we’ve offered graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses with such titles as “Exploring the Emergence of Eco-Theatre”; “Forest Fetish: Reading the Nature of the West Coast”; “The Environmental Gaze: Literature, Film, Theory”; and “Signifying Canines: Mimesis, Animals, Markets.”
Recent MA graduates have completed projects on such topics as Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and other nonfiction survival narratives; the cultural geography of Vancouver, as represented in novels by Douglas Coupland and Wayson Choy; and the environmental(ist) discourses drawn upon by sustainability advertising.
University of Virginia
UVa has no program for, nor does it offer graduate classes in, environmental criticism. Professor Stephen Railton, who teaches nineteenth-century American literature, is the department’s primary resource for students interested in environmental criticism, and he has directed several dissertations with an environmental focus. The Brown Residential College at UVa offers a bi-annual, two-year teaching fellowship to doctoral students, the “Sara Shallenberger Brown Fellowship for Environmental Literature,” which provides tuition, a full stipend, and the opportunity to teach upper-division courses on literature and the environment.
Western Carolina University
Western Carolina University’s English program offers an MA (with concentrations in Literature, Professional Writing, and Rhetoric and Composition), MAT and MAEd. Degrees, and certificates in Technical and Professional Writing and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Graduate study in English at WCU allows students the opportunity to work with faculty whose research and creative pursuits are environmentally focused: Catherine Carter (English education, poetry), Mae Claxton (Southern Literature), Annette Debo (American Literature), Pam Duncan (Creative writing), Brent Kinser (British literature), Ron Rash (Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies, novelist), Brian Railsback (American literature), and Laura Wright (Postcolonial Literature and founder of Vegan Studies).
Located between the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains, Western Carolina University is close to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Reservation, and some of the nation’s most beautiful national forests. Western Carolina University is committed to energy conservation and sustainability, recognizing that “a sustainable campus focuses on all aspects of environmental stewardship, from energy conservation and future land-use strategies, to waste reduction, water efficiency, recycling and more. We assist in the development and management of energy-related capital construction projects, and we pursue new ways to reduce energy consumption on campus. We are proud to be part of a comprehensive effort to increase awareness and facilitate sustainable practices throughout the university and the region.”
West Virginia University
The English Department at West Virginia University provides a collegial environment for advanced academic work in literary and cultural studies, as well as creative and professional writing. Several of our faculty members engage in environmentally-oriented research, pedagogy, and creative writing, including Timothy Sweet, Lowell Duckert, Julia Daniel, Cari Carpenter, Brian Ballentine, and Mark Brazaitis. Our diverse interests and expertise include environmental literature, travel narratives, urban ecocriticism, ecopoetics, animal studies and hunting narratives, georgic and agrarian literature, environmental justice, literary cartography, environmental criticism, ecological theory, ecocomposition, and the rhetorics of energy and global warming. students meet with local and regional environmental organizations, witnessing at-risk sites firsthand to consider the ways in which literature can influence current policy.
Because of our low graduate student to faculty ratio (3:1), you will receive attentive mentoring and instruction, as well as tailored support during your time on the job market. A sample of graduate-level coursework that has incorporated green themes or theories includes “Science and Public Culture in Early America,” “Current Directions in Literary Studies: Environmental Criticism,” “Nature’s Nation,” and “The Shadow,” a creative writing course which explored the shadow-side of human progress. In the classroom, you will have the opportunity to place your studies into conversation with current environmental issues. For example, in “Elemental Shakespeare,” students met with local and regional environmental organizations, witnessing at-risk sites firsthand to consider the ways in which literature can influence current policy. Our graduate students go on to complete compelling, ecologically engaged projects, such as dissertations like “Second natures: media, masculinity and the natural world in twentieth-century American literature and film,” or “‘To build, and plant, and keep a table’: class, gender, and the ideology of improvement in eighteenth-century women’s literature.” We welcome you to visit us in Morgantown and learn more about our program: http://english.wvu.edu/gr
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, the birthplace of Earth Day and has been the home to John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson, offers an environmentally progressive community in a picturesque and ecologically diverse region. Current English faculty with interests in environmental studies include Lynn Keller (poetry and ecocriticism); Theresa Kelley (botany and the history of science in British Romantic culture); Tom Schaub (rhetorics of nature in American literature); and Jeffrey Steele (19th C. urban writing and theories of space). A required Ph.D. minor provides structure for interdisciplinary work, fostered by the Nelson Institute, the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, and a wide range of other courses taught by such noted scholars as William Cronon (History) and Michael Bell (Community and Environmental Sociology).
York University—Toronto, Canada
The Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES) at York University is the oldest Environmental Studies program in Canada and supports interdisciplinary, individually-designed programs of graduate study at both the Masters/Magisteriate and Doctoral levels in fields across the Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. One of the Faculty’s particular areas of strength is cultural studies of the environment, including environmental philosophy, literary criticism, creative writing, performing and visual arts, animal studies, indigenous studies, spirituality and critical theory. Students choose from a wide range of course offerings both inside the Faculty and in other programs at York (e.g., English, Fine Arts, Social and Political Thought); they are also encouraged to create programs of reading and other activities that support their chosen educational goals.
FES Faculty in environmental cultural studies, ecocriticism and cognate fields include Deborah Barndt (popular education, photography and visual arts, postcolonialism and cultural studies); Mora Campbell (environmental ethics and philosophy, spirituality); Robin Cavanagh; (indigenous research methodologies and epistemomologies, education); Leesa Fawcett (animal studies, environmental education, gender and environments); Honor Ford-Smith (performance studies, community and environmental arts and Education); Catriona Sandilands (environmental cultural studies, environmental writing and literature, critical theory); Raymond Rogers (biological conservation, cultural studies); Joe Sheridan (environmental and sustainability education, environmental thought and First Nations traditions); Peter Timmerman (environmental ethics, environmental literatures). Other associated York faculty include Vermonja Alston, English (postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental justice); Jody Berland, Humanities (environmental cultural studies, animal studies); Tina Choi, English, (nineteenth century literatures of disease); Terry Goldie, English (Canadian literature, aboriginal literature, queer theory); Andil Gosine, Sociology (environmental justice, Caribbean studies); Shubhra Gururani, Anthropology (cultural politics of environment and development); Brenda Longfellow, Film (climate change); Natasha Myers, Sociology (cultural studies of science and technology); Jamie Scott, Geography (geography and literature).