When STEPHEN LEVIN, associate professor of English, first offered Ecofictions: Literature and the Environment in fall 2023, the undergraduate course filled up quickly with highly engaged students. “It was one of the most exciting teaching experiences I’ve had in my career,” he says.

As the world witnessed the damaging effects of climate change that year, from wildfires to flooding, students confronted fundamental questions about what it means to be human and “how we understand the human entanglement with the non-human world.”

Through readings in “ecocriticism” and environmental literature by authors in the U.S. and Global South, Levin’s students dove deeply into “examining colonialism, processes of domination, and the politics of power and identity,” he says.

Yet their core assignment was to undertake “an everyday life project,” inspired by literary critic and scholar Andrew Epstein’s book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture.

Story from Clark University Magazine, fall 2024

“The absolutely overwhelming nature of the environmental crisis makes it important to think in smaller contexts of what you can do, and how you can reflect on what you can control in your day-to-day personal decisions,” he explains, “and not to be completely destabilized or rendered passive.”

For almost a decade Levin has been involved in research in the environmental humanities, a field that took off after the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 1992.

“The realization of planetary crisis, and a shared sense of precarity, is what has made the current version of environmental humanities exceedingly important,” Levin says. “Environmental issues are more than a technocratic problem merely to be managed. If we rely solely on metrics, then something crucial is being missed.”

Increasingly, Clark—whose social and natural sciences faculty have long been celebrated for their research in climate change, sustainability, and conservation—is paying attention to the environmental humanities.

“THE PLANETARY CRISIS HAS MADE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT.”

This year, the Higgins Institute for the Arts and Humanities and A New Earth Conversation, a university-wide climate initiative, announced four faculty fellows in the environmental humanities who are developing courses for next spring. They include Levin and Geography Professor Max Ritts, who have proposed a course on Ecologies and Energies; Francophone Studies and Language, Literature, and Culture Professor ODILE FERLY, who will offer a class on Decolonial Ecologies in the Caribbean; and History Professor Nana Kesse, who will teach African Environmental History.

Ferly has been interested in environmental issues since her childhood in Guadeloupe. Due to rising ocean temperatures and water levels, the Caribbean islands face climate impacts including bleached coral reefs, receding mangrove forests that make communities more vulnerable to increased hurricanes, and beaches infested with jellyfish.

“I will focus my class on the human response to environmental changes, whether it’s an artistic response, cultural response, social response, or political response,” Ferly says.

“Literature and film have much more potential to make people react to what is happening and make a change, instead of simply hearing about those issues from scientists and politicians,” she insists. “The humanities engage with the imagination, which is important for thinking about the future.”  ▣