Category Archives: Environmental Studies
“The Age of Oil”
The Evolution of Gerald Durrell
Guest post by Mary Sanders Pollock When I saw My Family and Other Animals on a bookstore shelf thirty years ago, I had to have it. I grew up on a farm, in a large, vociferous family, and the resonance with my own life was obvious. It also turned out to be one of the… Read More »
Descartes’s Stove
Guest post by Hsuan L. Hsu, author of Air Conditioning Because they were available long before artificial cooling, heating technologies are at the center of many early Western writings that reflect the cultural underpinnings of thermal comfort and air conditioning. Among the most eloquent examples of ambient temperature as a precondition for thought is the… Read More »
Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change
This book originated out of my desire to reclaim climate change fiction (cli-fi) from the view that it is primarily concerned with future disasters and written in modes that go beyond realism to encompass the horrors of the looming apocalypse. Brilliant though novels of this kind can be, they seemed to me to run the… Read More »
Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts
Androids, aliens, and ghosts: No longer solely the territory of science fiction, the Gothic, and horror, these creatures increasingly cross literary genres as humans renegotiate and rework our conceptualizations of humanity, animality, and life itself in response to ongoing challenges posed by technology, environmental crises, and alterity. Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts borrows from the strangeness, creativity, and freshness of these emerging and imaginary creatures in contemporary novels, comic book series, and children’s books to reconceptualize often intractable views of nonhuman animals. Because these liminal figures confront anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, in ways that necessarily push against all forms of species dominance, the android, the alien, and the ghost are literary devices that help us to see nonhuman animals afresh and to fruitfully reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.
Glitter and the Fishing Lure
While researching my Object Lessons series book on glitter, I learned the surprising fact that one of the major commercial uses for this substance is in fishing lures. After finishing the book, I decided to investigate this phenomenon a bit deeper—and fell down what can only be described as a rabbit hole into another world.
The Medical Environmental Humanities and Public Health
Embracing Ecological Uncertainty through Fiction
Guest post by Marco Caracciolo The future has always been uncertain, but the ecological crisis presents us with an unprecedented degree of uncertainty in thinking about the future. Scientists who model the effects of global warming typically distinguish between pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. The gap between them is significant: concretely, it could mean the difference… Read More »
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism two years later, by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, edited by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, consists of 32 articles organized in four sections: Paradigms, Ethics, Technology, and Aesthetics. It’s now available in paperback. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism appears in paperback in April 2022. It was first published in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic that is still… Read More »