UC Berkeley undergraduates interested in the Humanities & Environment Course Thread should contact course-threads@berkeley.edu.
The Humanities and Environment Course Thread connects students to new approaches to understanding the ways that humans imagine, represent, and interact with the natural world. The humanistic study of the interplay of natural and cultural environments raises challenging questions about how our imagined and thought-about relations with the natural world have contributed to our strained relations with our environments.
Humanistic reflection further challenges the ways in which we draw the very distinction of “nature” and “culture.” While these are questions with deep roots in the humanities, they have been reinvigorated by new developments in conservation, environmentalism, and bio-engineering, and they have produced across the humanities new scholarly engagements, including animal studies, post-humanistic philosophy, environmental history, and the visual culture of nature.
The Humanities and Environment Thread links courses in a wide array of departments across the humanities and the social sciences that offer a variety of methodological and thematic approaches to the humanistic study of our places in and our transformations of the natural world.