2024-2025 GREEN BAAS ROUNDTABLE SERIES

Please join us for this series of online roundtables conceived with the needs of ECRs in mind: from writing tips to a communal writing session and including presentations of new research, we hope to create a supportive environment for UK-based researchers interested in American environmental studies.

Session 1: Writing in/for the Environmental Humanities

Thursday 12 September 2024, 4pm BST, Zoom

Listen to the audio recording of the session below:

The Environmental Humanities is a growing field of interdisciplinary research that puts in dialogue the humanities and the natural and social sciences to bring new insights on environmental matters. New journals and book series have popped up in recent years, reflecting the exciting scholarship emerging on themes as varied as multispecies studies, petrocultures, coastal studies, energy humanities, extinction studies, and more.

But what are the challenges (and opportunities) of writing for an interdisciplinary audience about the environment? How can scholars breach the interdisciplinary divide and speak to all environmental humanists? Can environmental humanities writing help scholars reach a wider public?

Conceived with the needs and questions of early-career researchers in mind, this session brings together five experienced scholars who edit journals and/or book series about the environmental humanities to share with us their reflections on the field and the challenges and opportunities of writing in/for the environmental humanities.

We asked them to reflect on these questions:

• In your experience as editors, what defines excellent environmental humanities writing and can you give some examples that have inspired your own writing? 
• What makes writing for an environmental humanities audience different from environmental history/eco-criticism or other disciplinary type of writing about the environment?
• What are the strengths/challenges of environmental humanities writing?

After brief introductory statements by all featured speakers, we will open up the floor to a Q&A.

Featured speakers:

– Prof. Joni Adamson (Arizona State University), Co-Editor of the Routledge Press Environmental Humanities book series and Director of the Humanities for the Environment North American Observatory.

– Dr Hannah Boast (The University of Edinburgh), Associate Editor at Environmental Humanities and co-convener of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network

– Prof. Peggy Karpouzou and Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), Series Editors of “Exeter Studies in Environmental Humanities: Past, Present and Future Econarratives”

– Prof. Isaac Land (Indiana State University), Co-Editor at Coastal Studies & Society

Chair: Dr Elsa Devienne (Northumbria University), co-lead for GREEN BAAS