Courses

Fall 2026

ENG 6824 – Proseminar in Environmental Humanities
Th, periods 3–5 (9:35 AM – 12:35 PM), Turlington Hall 2349

Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams

– Gary Snyder, “Earth Verse,” Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996)

An introduction to best practices in research, teaching, and out-of-classroom activities in
the environmental humanities (EH), with emphasis on effective methods for
introducing undergraduate humanities students to the science of planetary climate
transformation and to literary media (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction) and visual media
(graphic novels, cinema) addressing the place of the human in a more-than-human
world.

Students will read widely from the emerging literature in ecopoetic and ecocritical
pedagogy, ecosophy, ecopoetry, and ecofiction, and will develop practical solutions for
adding EH theory and practice to their scholarly and teaching emphases.

Spring 2027

AML 4170 – Ecopoetry & Ecopoetics
Location & times TBA

An introduction to and eclectic survey of modern poetry addressing human relations with the more than human world in an age of planetary transformation. We’ll read mostly poetry by American writers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, though we’ll turn further back in time for a few important historical precursors. Graded course requirements include three short critical readings of poems chosen by the student from among those discussed in class, and participation in a collaborative group project.

LIT 4930 – The Lunar Voyage
Location & times TBA

An eclectic survey of the literary canon of extraordinary voyages to and from our planet’s nearest neighbor in space, and what – or who – we may discover there.

After a brief review of the planetary science and cultural meaning of the Moon – how it is, as Rebecca Boyle observes, the Moon “made us who we are” – we’ll start with two of the earliest translunar literary narratives, Lucian’s Vera Historia (True History, Greece, 2nd c. CE, widely considered the first science fiction narrative) and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Japan, 10th c. CE). Then we’ll leap ahead to the 17th century for Johannes Kepler’s astronomy-lesson-as-fiction Somnium (The Dream, 1634) and Francis Godwin’s and Cyrano de Bergerac’s utopian fantasies The Man in the Moone (Godwin, 1638) and The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (Cyrano, 1657). We’ll travel a bit with copies of Rudolf Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels (1785) in our pockets, before the 19th century presents us with the archetypal texts of the modern genre: Edgar Allan Poe (“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal,” 1835), Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865; Around the Moon, 1870), H.G. Wells (First Men in the Moon, 1901), and a few marginal but striking contemporary oddities, such as Pierre de Sélènes’s An Unknown World: Two Years on the Moon (1896). Then we’re headlong into the early twentieth century via the age of rocketry (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard’s visions of the voyage’s physics and mechanics are determinate here) by way of the naïve enthusiasm of the pulp, golden, and silver ages of science fiction. We’ll read several short works in the launching-and-landing strains of the genre from the first half of the century, less comedic and self-reflective than their predecessors.

As July 20, 1969, approaches, the lunar voyage narrative begins to turn from the technological novelties of the journey and the funhouse mirrors of orbiting and treading on a dusty and lifeless pebble, to the deflationary psychic economy of we’ve-arrived-now-what? and the melancholia of occupation. Elements of political satire and skepticism of scientific hubris – almost universal in this genre, and we’ll address why that might be – grow more direct and critical (Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, 1959, for example). An imaginative exhaustion begins to set in, even as Armstrong takes his first small step; the Apollo program is ended in 1972, and actual lunar voyage stories cease for at least another half-century. Thomas M. Disch’s “Moondust, the Smell of Hay, and Dialectical Materialism” (1967), Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (1970), and J.G. Ballard’s “The Man Who Walked on the Moon” (1985) and “Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon” (1991) capture the declining mood at the century’s close. Perversely this period, and the next few decades, represent a true golden age of lunar science, and international, publicly– and privately-funded unmanned missions. But the urge to leave another footprint on the surface also calms considerably. We’ll discuss the seeming reversal of the calming in narratives of the American Artemis and Chinese Chang’e and Mengzhou programs, and the fevered, openly nationalist race between China and the US to “return” humans to the Moon before this decade is out.

Then we’ll pass through a few disquieting visions of lunar colonization that counter the triumphalist fantasies of the first half o the twentieth century – for example, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lunatics” (1988) and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2026) – and conclude the course with Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility (2022), asking why it is that one of the most elegant and humane tales of lunar residence of the twenty-first century (thus far) should depend so heavily on literary gymnastics of time travel and meta-fiction.

Graded course requirements include three short critical papers on assigned readings for the course.

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