The Humanities at UR 2024-25 theme: How (And Why) Do We Represent Nature?
This question invites us to consider “representation” in both its political meaning and its aesthetic meaning. “Nature” is represented in paintings, poems, scripture, music, dancing, novels, laws, regulations, equations, activisms, advertising campaigns. This question asks how environments—and often their relations to human concerns—are represented across media, geographic and cultural contexts, and different historical moments. It explores questions about what constitutes “human nature,” and it invites us to self-reflexively ask how humanistic practices—especially artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical ones—have been sites of resource use and accumulation, and how experimental texts and events across many media and embodied performances might disrupt and re-envision those ecological entanglements? The question invites us to look at “nature” again, go over its history as a concept and field of aesthetic and philosophical knowledge, to learn, perhaps, how to see and feel it differently in a moment of unfolding climate catastrophe.
In addition to serving as the theme for Humanities Connect and the Humanities Fellows Program, at the bottom of this page you can find a list of courses addressing the theme. Some of these are open to any student, and some are not. While we hope this list is useful to students (and advisors) in crafting plans for 2024-25, we also think it’s exciting to be able to see where this question is being asked, and we hope that seeing that gives us a new understanding of who we are, what we do, what we might yet do together.
Theme Courses for 2024-2025:
Scroll below to view a list of the theme courses for this year's theme. Courses marked “General” do not have prerequisites; other courses have some requirements. We may add to this list through early June when incoming first-year Spiders register and we will circulate a list of spring classes in the fall before the advising period.
Language of Man Micro Syllabus
Theme courses for 2024-2025
FALL 2024
AFST201 Rumours of War Seminar (Jillean McCommons) [AIHS, IFPE]
CLSC302 Roman Art & Archaeology (Elizabeth Baughan) [AIVP, FSVP]
CLSC329 The Ancient World in Cinema (Erika Damer) [AILT, IFWC, FSLT, IFWC]
CRWR313 Creative Nonfiction (Libby Gruner) [Prerequisites] [IFWC]
ENGL215 Reading Science Fiction & Fantasy (Kylie Korsnack) [AILT, FSLT, IFWC]
ENGL312 English Literature of the Romantic Movement (Thomas Manganaro) [Prerequisites] [AILT, IFWC]
ENGL325 Age of the American Renaissance (Kevin Pelletier) [Prerequisites]
ENGL330 Victorian Experiments in Fictional Form (Libby Gruner) [Prerequisites]
ENGL367 Indigenous Film in North America (Monika Siebert) [Prerequisites]
ENGL400 Indigenous Literature (Monika Siebert) [Senior Seminar]
FREN305 Writing in French through Literature and Culture (Sara Pappas) [Prerequisites] [IFWC]
FREN327 The Question of Modernity (Lidia Radi) [Prerequisites] [AILT, WC, FSLT]
FREN471 Francophone Studies (Kasongo Kapanga) [Prerequisites]
FYS100 Human/Nature (Nathan Snaza) [FYS, Endeavor]
FYS100 Dances for Everybody (Alicia Diaz) [FYS]
FYS100 Buckwheat & Caviar (Yvonne Howell) [FYS]
FYS100 Tao of Leadership (Jane Geaney) [FYS, Endeavor]
GEOG210 Planet Earth: People and Place (David Salisbury) [AISO, FSSA, IFPE]
GEOG250 What's Hot in the City? (Todd Lookingbill) [Endeavor] [FSNB]
GEOG333 Amazonia Connected (David Salisbury) [SSIR]
HIST199 Maps, Indigenous Dispo in Latin America (Juan Ardila Falla) [AIHS, FSHT]
HIST260 Colonial Latin America (Juan Ardila Falla) [AIHS, FSHT]
HIST291 History of Public Health & Biomedicine in the Global South (Carol Summers) [AIHS, FSHT, IFPE]
HS101 Global Health (Kathryn Jacobsen, Nigel James)
HS331 Planetary Health (Jeremy Hoffman) [Prerequisites]
JOUR222 Turning Science into Stories (Karen Masterson) [IFWC, AILT]
LAIS332 Introduction to Latin American Literatures II (Mariela Méndez) [Prerequisites] [AILT, IFEB, FSLT]
LAIS467 Stories Matter/Telling and Listening in Medicine (Karina Vasquez) [Prerequisites]
LDST210 Justice and Civil Society (Lauren Henley, Thad Williamson, Ekrem Mus) [Prerequisites] [IFPE]
LDST305 / PLSC379 Law, Native Sovereignty & Treaties (David Wilkins) [AIHS, IFPE]
LDST306 Sex, leadership, and the Evolution of Human Societies (Chris von Rueden)
LDST350 Killers & Cults (Lauren Henley) [AIHS, IFPE]
LDST390 / SOC379 Leadership in the Digital Age (Bo Yun Park)
LLC335 Bombs, Bolsheviks, Ballet (Cultural History of the Soviet Union) (Yvonne Howell) [AIHS, FSHT]
MUS213 Recording, Transforming and Organizing Sound (Ben Broenin) [Prerequisites] [AIVP, FSVP]
PLSC362 Environmental Law and Policy (Chris Miller) [Prerequisites]
RELG206 Leadership Ethics: Early China (Jane Geaney) [AILT, FSLT]
RHCS353 Rhetoric and Law (Mari Lee Mifsud)
THTR207 Text and Performance (Anne Van Gelder, Dorothy Holland) [AIVP, FSVP, IFEB]
THTR239 Latinx on Stage: From Barrio to Broadway (Patricia Herrera) [AIVP, FSVP, IFEB]
VMAP279 Documentary Art Media (Jeremy Drummond)
WGSS200 Intro to WGSS (Dorothy Holland, Julietta Singh) [AISO, FSSA, IFPE]
WGSS490 The Art of Friendship (Julietta Singh) [Senior Capstone]
All Year Events
The Nature of Representation
“There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents.”
-Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1918)
The Nature of Representation foregrounds questions of how our conceptions of “nature” have been shaped by representational practices in both the aesthetic and political senses, exploring how the current climate catastrophe is inextricable from colonialism and anthropocentric worldviews. The festival features contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers who don’t take for granted that “language” is merely human, that there are other “natural” languages, and that attuning to those other languages requires us to “pass on” stories that disrupt the violence of Man, that summon worlds through storytelling and translating.
Featuring: Ruth Ozeki, Tanya Tagaq, Cathy Park Hong, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, Susan Stryker, Richmond Shakespeare, Sharon Holland, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Jack Halberstam, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins.
Border Cantos
This exhibition displays art by photographer Richard Misrach and composer/artist Guillermo Galindo who both began collaborating in 2011.
Misrach’s large-scale photographs beautifully capture the various types of landscapes, textures, and experiences found across the almost 2,000-mile dividing line. But, by showing moments of disruption on the land, they also introduce a complicated look at policing the boundary. Galindo’s installation Sonic Borders is an original score for eight instruments, created out of discarded objects found and collected at the border. The composition embraces the pre-Columbian belief that there was an intimate connection between an instrument and the material from which it was made, with no separation between spiritual and physical worlds. Based on the Mesoamerican “Venus calendar,” Sonic Borders plays for a total of 260 minutes and is separated into 13 cycles of 20 minutes. Within these cycles, the instruments play in small groups of two or more, or all together as an orchestra.
Feminist Decolonial Resistance: Climate Justice for Puerto Rico
Feminist Decolonial Resistance: Climate Justice for Puerto Rico’’ builds upon and expands work carried out since 2023 by faculty in the Departments of Latin American, Latino & Iberian Studies, Geography, the Environment & Sustainability, and Theatre & Dance. Professors Alicia Díaz, Mary Finley-Brook, Patricia Herrera, and Mariela Méndez, together with a cohort of 16 students are engaging this summer in summer research around the environmental and financial crisis in Puerto Rico.
The group will spend a week in May in Puerto Rico strengthening their networks with universities and grassroots organizations while collaborating with lawyers and impacted populations. Community-based energy autonomy initiatives empower overburdened communities and disrupt for-profit centralized exploiters harming communities of color. The team will examine how organized communities in Puerto Rico exercise collective sovereignty over their land, energy, food and water and fight against centralization, dependence, coloniality, and racialized ‘disaster capitalism.’
Throughout AY 2024-2025, some members of this cohort will share their work at the Humanities Center through various events that will expand engagement with forms of decolonial feminist resistance against the environmental crisis.
Upcoming 2024-2025 Events
Tim Morton on Romantic Poetry
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Professor of English at Rice University. Both an acclaimed specialist in British Romantic poetics and a leading figure in the philosophical movement called speculative realism or object-oriented ontology, Morton’s many books include The Ecological Thought, Hyperobjects, Realist Magic, and Becoming Ecological, and their work has involved collaboration with figures far outside of academia, including Björk. For their talk, Professor Morton will revisit the role of their book Ecology Without Nature, a publication that transformed both Morton’s career trajectory and the field of the environmental humanities.
Cary Wolfe on Emerson
Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, and Founding Director of the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory. One of the leading figures in the fields of animal studies, the posthumanities, and the environmental humanities, Wolfe is the author of six books, including The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson, What is Posthumanism?, Before the Law: On Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, and, most recently, Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds. He is the editor of the Posthumanities book series at the University of Minnesota Press. Professor Wolfe’s talk will address Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature.”
Timothy Beal on Genesis
Timothy Beal is Distinguished Professor and Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University, where he directs h.Lab. He is the author or editor of many books, including When Time is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book, Biblical Literacy, Religion and Its Monsters, Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction, and The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation, and Esther.
Donovan Schaefer on Darwin
Donovan Schaefer is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, The Evolution of Affect Theory, and most recently Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin, winner of the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the International Society for Science and Religion book prize. Professor Schaefer’s talk will focus on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species.
Susan Stryker on Frankenstein
Susan Stryker is one of the founders of trans studies, author of many award-winning books including the almost canonical Transgender History, as well as many influential essays across now five decades, some collected in the just-published When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader, edited by Mckenzie Wark. One of the most visible and influential trans scholars, she has appeared widely in national and international media. She was co-editor of the Transgender Studies Reader’s two editions, and co-founder of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. She was the recipient of the 2015 Yale University James Robert Brudner Class of 1983 Memorial Prize for lifetime accomplishment and contribution to the fields of lesbian and gay studies. Her talk will draw from a new book, as well as reflecting on the role of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in her thinking and trans scholarship more broadly.
International Education Week
November 18-22, 2024
Details to come
Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Audre Lorde
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of the poetic trilogy of Black feminist study Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M. Archive: After the End of the World, and Dub: Finding Ceremony, as well as the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Life and the forthcoming biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, as well as the editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Life on the Front Lines. She is the winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize. Gumbs will lead a discussion of Audre Lorde’s 1989 essay, “Of Survival and Generators.”
Sharon Holland and Sarah Jane Cervenak on Toni Morrison
Sharon Holland is Townsand Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and the author of three books: Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, The Erotic Life of Racism, and an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, and the co-author, with Tiyana Miles, of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. She was the 2022-23 President of the American Studies Association.
Sarah Jane Cervenak is a Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, and Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life. She is the editor, with J. Kameron Carter, of the book series The Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study.
This event explores how Toni Morrison is not just one of the greatest novelists of all time, and thinkers about slavery and its afterlives, but also one of our world’s most important ecological thinkers. The conversation will take up Beloved, A Mercy, and the Nobel Lecture. Beyond making these texts available on the Language of Man Syllabus page, the Humanities Center will make available free print copies. We invite everyone on campus to read Toni Morrison in 2024-25!