Spring 2010 CHE-Related Course
Environmental Studies 900, CHE Seminar on Historical and Cultural Methods in Environmental Research, 3 credits
Tuesdays from 5:30-8:00 pm in 202 Bradley Memorial
William Cronon
The CHE Methods Seminar is being offered for the first time. The seminar has five goals:
- It surveys key analytical tools and interpretive methods for researching and understanding environmental change in its complex cultural and historical contexts.
- It introduces graduate students to faculty members and fellow students from departments and programs across campus who study past environmental change from cultural and historical points of view.
- It offers an intellectual forum for discussing the respective contributions of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to our understanding of past, present, and future environmental change.
- It explores the many challenges and opportunities associated with working across disciplinary boundaries to understand environmental, cultural, and historical change.
- Finally, as a practical matter, it fulfills a core requirement of the CHE Certificate, which grad students can earn on its own or use to fulfill the minor requirement for their PhDs.
The CHE Methods Seminar is intended primarily for graduate students completing the CHE Certificate and those who are affiliated with CHE. The application deadline for the seminar was November 6, and enrollment in the course is now full.
Fall 2009 CHE-Related Courses
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Gregg Mitman and Judith Helfand
Wednesdays 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Gregg Mitman and Judith Helfand
Spring 2009 CHE-Related Courses
Wednesdays, 6 to 8:30 pm, 5106 Social Science Building
Sissel Schroeder
In this course, students are introduced to the variety of Native American cultures in Wisconsin. We will cover twelve thousand years of accommodations to diverse natural and social environments, starting with the initial peopling of Wisconsin and ending with the earliest Euroamerican exploration of the state.
Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:30-10:45 am, 7105 Helen C. White Hall
Lynn Keller
The significant place occupied by English language poetry in the field of "environmental literature" is insured by the Romantic nature lyric, and most environmental criticism concerning poetry has focused on "nature poetry" in the Romantic tradition. Course readings will begin with some selections from Wordsworth and with recent American work in that vein, so that we can analyze assumptions about nature, wilderness, urban environments, and environmentalism that are bound up with conventions of the personal lyric, the pastoral, the sublime. Most of the course, however, will be devoted to exploring more experimental U.S. writing of recent decades, some of it urban in focus, and investigating whether today's alternative poetics encode or support alternative understandings of nature and the wild, or of possibly different approaches to the environmental problems we face. Readings will include ecocritical theory as well as poetry and literary criticism.
Wednesdays, 2 to 5 pm, 104 Russell Laboratories
Nancy Langston
This seminar will explore the shared history of people and forests around the world, paying special attention to the ways historical approaches can help us understand current environmental conflicts. We will examine how and why forests have changed over time, how different peoples have used or abused the forest, how societies have struggled to establish policies governing forests, and how perceptions of forests have changed. Topics for discussion will include:
For more information about the course, visit the course website.
Wednesdays, 9 to 11:30 am, 7130 Social Science Building
Lynn K. Nyhart
This graduate seminar focuses on the following questions: How did European and American scientists and social theorists make meaning of the distribution of living things – plants, animals, and people – across the face of the earth from about 1750 to the aftermath of World War II? And how do we situate their scientific theorizing in relation to imperial ambition and conquest, human migration, and the human-driven redistribution of organisms across the globe? Topics will range from debates over geographical determinism in the Enlightenment to twentieth-century debates over the roles of isolation and migration in evolution, and from analyses of bird distribution to ideas about human migration and the rise of civilization. Our task will be to understand the intellectual history involved here in relation to the political, social, and environmental histories in which it was embedded. While the course covers two centuries, emphasis will be laid on time periods and topics of most interest to seminar participants, who will be expected to write a research paper.
All CHE-Related Courses Offered at UW-Madison