School of Arts and Sciences
Environmental Studies Program

Track V: Environmental Arts and Humanities

The goal of the Environmental Arts and Humanities track is to expose the students to interdisciplinary approaches to a wide range of textual, visual, material, artistic and performative expressions and representations of environmental issues. The track digs into humanities and arts-based analyses of land, the built environment, and infrastructure, by studying and embodying human relationships to non-human beings. Students integrate different ways of knowing, and explore deep ideological constructs that have influenced human concepts and behaviors with regard to the environment across places, times, and cultures. Classes consider how imagination, storytelling, and critical analysis may produce different models of adaptation to shifting ecologies and build resilient communities. Students learn how to ask critical and creative questions that will deepen their approach to any career in Environmental Studies and beyond, while articulating a vision for alternative sustainable futures grounded in a deep understanding of the past and the present. 

View sample paths for Track V: Environmental Arts and Humanities

Students focusing on the Environmental Arts and Humanities Track must take the following track courses in addition to other general requirements:

Applied Environmental Studies Stand-alone Majors:

  • Four elective courses (Applied ENVS majors can use up to 1 of the Foundations and Theory Courses as one of their electives)

Environmental Studies Co-Majors:

  • Five courses as follows:
  • Two Foundations and Theory Courses
  • Three elective courses
    Note: Courses must come from at least two different departments and include one seminar

Foundations and Theory 

(Two for Co-majors; Applied ENVS majors can use up to 1 of the Foundations and Theory Courses as one of their electives)

  • ANTH 024 Anthropology of the Environment (Fall)
  • CLS 035/ENV 035 Ancient Natural Disasters (Spring)
  • ENG/ENV 160 Environmental Justice and World Literature (Spring)
  • ENV 140 Environment, History, and Justice (Variable)
  • ENV 110 Environmental Humanities (Fall - variable)
  • ENV 111/HIST 102 Global Environmental History (Variable)
  • RCD 179 Beyond the Human: Creative & Critical Ecologies (formerly called Feral Theory)
  • VMS 127 Cultivating Ecologies

Electives

  • ANTH 028 Anthropology of Capitalism
  • ANTH 142 American Meat (Variable)
  • ANTH 174 Thinking with Plants (Variable)
  • ANTH 178 Animals and Posthuman Thought * (Variable) 
  • CSHD 034/234/ ENV 034/ CVS 032/ ED 034 Children, Nature, and the Development of Earth Stewards
  • CLS 105/ENV 106 Nature and the Environment in Greek Mythology (Spring) *
  • CLS 146 Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine
  • CLS 185 Pestilence in Antiquity: Ecology of Infectious Disease in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean (Fall)
  • DNC 172 Dance and Environment
  • ENG 008/ENV 195 Writing the Climate Crisis
  • ENG/ENV 176 Earth Matters 
  • ENV 111/HIST 102 Global Environmental History -  if not taken as an intro class (Fall - odd years)
  • ENV/GER 182 Imagining the Environment: Crosscultural Perspectives* (Spring)
  • ENV 199 Senior Thesis * (only if approved by ENVS program)
  • HIST 012 Global History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
  • HIST 102 Global Environmental History
  • MUS 036 / ENV 036 Music and Nature
  • PHIL 025 Food Ethics
  • RCD 179 Race and Settler Capitalism in the US
  • SMFA 155 Interdisciplinary Practices: Science, Art and Cultivating Knowledge (Variable)
  • VMS 125 Art and the Anthropocene
  • VMS 129 The Greening of Art: Ecology, Sustainability and Sculpture Since 1970 (Fall)
  • VMS 140 Imagining the Amazon. Art and Activism