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