The second annual Colby Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities was scheduled to take place August 1-7, 2020. Due to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, we will postpone for a year. Fortunately, we have been able to secure commitments from all three seminar leaders and have rescheduled the Summer Institute for Sunday, August 1st to Saturday August 7th, 2021. We plan for the Institute to be the same in every respect, with a week of seminars, lectures, workshops, and a trip to Allen Island.
Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Colby Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities brings together scholars from across the world to collectively explore how this developing field contributes to the theorization, imagination, and practice of socially just and ecologically hopeful futures for humans and nonhumans in a global collective. The seminar leaders of the second Colby Summer institute are Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor of English and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Imre Szeman, Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.
In just its second year, the Summer Institute generated extraordinary interest, with 127 applicants representing 29 disciplines, and hailing from 13 different countries. The 27 accepted applicants constitute a remarkable and diverse group of scholars, whom we look forward to welcoming to Colby in 2021!
Seminar Leaders
Stacy Alaimo
Lecture: Out of our Depths: Science, Aesthetics, and Global Visions of the Deep Sea
Seminar: Science Studies and the Blue Humanities
Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her books include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016). Alaimo is currently writing a book entitled Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss and co-editing a book series at Duke UP called “Elements.”
Bishnupriya Ghosh
Lecture: The Blood Archives: Theorizing Epidemic Media
Seminar: Ecology After the Biological Turn
Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches postcolonial theory, global media, and environmental studies. Her current research is on the relations between environmental media and global public health.
Imre Szeman
Lecture: Solar Life
Seminar: Extractivism: On the Cultures of Resource Extraction
Imre Szeman is University Research Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. His main areas of research are in energy and environmental studies, social and political philosophy, and critical theory and cultural studies. Szeman is one of the founders of the energy humanities, a new area of research crucial to addressing climate change. His most recent books are On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (2019), and Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond (2019, ed. with Jeff Diamanti). In 2020, he will be the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow.
2019 Summer Institute
In August 2019, the inaugural Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities brought together 28 scholars from as close to home as Maine and as far afield as Australia. They participated in a week of lectures, seminars, and workshops, and visited the Colby Museum of Art and the beautiful Allen Island, former summer retreat of the Wyeth family of painters. For a brief recap of the inaugural Summer Institute and participant testimonials please click here, and for a detailed account, please click here. And for a brief video of the 2019 Summer Institute, please look below.
