Research Cluster: Environmental Sciences and Humanities

Led By

• Rhiannon Stephens, Professor of History
• Jason Smerdon, Lamont Research Professor

Former Cluster Leaders

• Shahid Naeem
• Sara Tjossem
• Deborah Coen

This Research Cluster is on hiatus for 2023-2024. 

This cluster brings together scholars in the ecological and earth sciences, economics, political science, anthropology, philosophy, history, geography, and literature, to explore the possibilities for an integrated approach to the environment and our current climate crisis.

There is much to gain by expanding such collaborations to include scholars from the humanities and broadening the scope of the analysis. A historical perspective, for instance, can illuminate how social and economic structures and forms of intellectual authority have altered the human relationship to the non-human world. Philosophy can enable analysis of the competing values at stake in environmental politics and of the epistemological foundations of environmental knowledge. Literary analysis can help to chart new possibilities for communicating about environmental issues. The goal of this cluster is to foster cross-disciplinary exchange and, ultimately, to generate collaborative research projects among scientists from earth and environmental sciences, and ecology, evolution, and environmental biology partnering with scholars of history, religion, anthropology, and economics.

In 2021-2022, the cluster’s focus was on history and climate change, with a particular focus on Africa, Latin America, Indigenous North America, and South Asia.

From 2017-2019, the cluster’s unifying theme was food, farming, and sustainability.