Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities
Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities
Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities
The Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities brings together colleagues from across disciplines who are united by a common concern and challenge: the work of the arts and humanities in current debates around environment and sustainability, cultures and communities, narrative and representation. CEAH aims to promote research and discussion concerning historical and cultural narratives of ‘nature’ and natural resources, landscape and place, cultural knowledges and values. We are committed to contributing to scientific work on questions of human resilience and sustainability by discovering and describing the textual and cultural constitution of present and past meanings and experiences of environmental change and societal transition.
Our work in the Arts and Humanities contributes to contemporary thinking about environment and sustainability by historicizing, contesting and problematizing the terms of environmental debate. This work is crucial in an area of urgent political action and public engagement, where an awareness of arts and humanities perspectives has the potential to change present understanding, policy and activity. Forms of artistic representation and cultural imagination, including literary texts, artworks, poems, pictures, sculptures and monuments, crafts and film, create popular ideas and beliefs about the relationships between individuals, societies and the environment. CEAH exists to provide common ground to explore these material entanglements from different disciplinary points of view.
Together we provide a range of expertise, experience and perspectives in reaching a critical understanding of the workings and re-workings of the past and present in current debates on the environmental and social challenges of our time.
Image by Thomas Moule (1850) (http://www.oldmap.co.uk/OldCornishMap.php) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Our research areas
- Society, politics and nature
- Communities, cultures and identities
- Critical heritage studies
- Militarised landscapes
- Memory, loss and memorialization
- The body, embodiment and experience
- Landscape, place and space
- Knowledge economies and the politics of the archive
- Narrative framing and storytelling
- Histories of science and technology
Current and recent projects
- Tim Cooper: 'Catastrophe, Community and Environment: The Impact of the Torrey Canyon Oil Disaster on Cornwall and the Isles of Sicily', (British Academy)
- Bryony Onciul: Troubled Waters, Stormy Futures: heritage in times of accelerated climate change (AHRC)
- Catriona Pennell: First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme
- Nicola Whyte: Stories of Change: Exploring Energy and Community in the Past, Present and Future (AHRC, 2014-2017); The Past in its Place (ERC, 2012-2016)
Staff
Contact
Nicola Whyte (History)
Members
Jason Baskin (Penryn English)
Helen Berry (Streatham History)
Tim Cooper (Penryn History)
Freyja Cox Jensen (Streatham History)
Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley (Streatham History)
James Fisher (Streatham History)
Jamie Hampson (Penryn History)
Elin Jones (Streatham History)
Jim Kelly (Penryn English)
Aimee Le (Penryn English)
Henry Lozano Knight (Streatham History)
Bryony Onciul (Penryn History)
Catriona Pennell (Penryn History)
Natalie Pollard (Penryn English)
Chloe Preedy (Penryn English)
Study
Level One Undergraduate
- Climate Emergency! An Introduction to Environmental Humanities
- HIC1301 World History: Science, Environment and Sustainability
Level Two Undergraduate
- HUC2014 Mapping and the Environmental Imaginary: Literature, History, Politics - 15
- credits
- HUC2004 Literature and the Environment - 15 credits
- HIC2028 Art and Archaeology in Postcolonial Nations - 15 credits
- HIC2328 Landscape History: Power and Protest, c. 1500-c1800 -15 credits
- TRU2904 Human Animal
Level Three Undergraduate
- HUC3044 Contemporary Literature and Diaspora: Politics, Identity and Place
- HUC3014 21st-century Literature and the Global City
- HUC3016 Irish Stories: History, Politics, Literature and Heritage
- TRU3913 The Air in Literature
- HIC3307 The Politics of Nature
- HIC3311 Indigenous History, Colonialism and Identity in Western Canada
- HIC3305 Society, Landscape and Environment, 1500-1800