This class examines the history, science, and cultures of pain, focusing on the complex relationship between bodies and environment in the modern age. Human bodies are inescapably tied to their surroundings, and recent scholars have argued that pain acts as a tether between ourselves and the environments we inhabit. Pain is central to the human condition, but its nature—at once social, cultural, and biological—can be elusive. In recent years, contemporary debates surrounding the escalating climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have moved questions of pain, its representation, and its singular relationship to environment to the fore.
One of the central promises of modern thought has been the “liberation” of humans from the natural world; indeed, many believe that we humans live outside or beyond “nature.” But narratives of pain, especially pain derived from environmental hazard, challenge this assumption. Pain, as our case study, will reveal the great extent to which bodies and environments are not only themselves inseparable, but also the ways in which they are entangled with society and culture; the pain of bodies is the pain of populations, the pain of nations.
Some of the themes and topics we will address are, industrial health, the atomic age, “natural disasters,” famine, pollution, pandemics, and climate change. Case studies will include, for example, scarcity and hunger during the Little Ice Age; health seeking and health tourism; industrial illness such as the harrowingly descriptive “it hurts, it hurts disease;” parathion poisoning among migrant workers; “Cancer Alley”/ “Chemical Corridor” in Louisiana; #NoDAPL and the Dakota Access Pipeline; and the opioid crisis. Each of these examples demands reconsiderations of the race, gender, ability, and class dimensions of pain and its relation to not just environmental conditions, but also to human action and meaning making.
This class interrogates questions that cut to the quick of the human experience: what is our relationship to nature? What is our relationship to pain? Other critical questions include, how has the rise of emerging diseases shaped visions of the global environment? What historical role have issues of class, gender, race, and disability played in the inequitable distribution of pollution? What gets to count as pain? Whose pain is worth addressing and how? What is the role of activist involvement in combating environmental hazards? How has living in toxic environments altered experiences of identity, health, and place? What do we do with people whose pain cannot be eliminated or ameliorated?
Pain and Nature will introduce students to the rich literature that takes these questions to task; drawing on works from self-consciously interdisciplinary fields like disability studies, pain studies, and environmental humanities, alongside work from history and anthropology. A range of primary sources that cut across genre will animate our discussions alongside scholarly works —memoirs and essays, newspaper articles, scientific publications, poetry, film, vlogs, political speeches, and manifestos. In drawing from a truly interdisciplinary range of sources, this class will underscore the need to understand contemporary problems using interdisciplinary methods. Writing assignments will ask students to delve into a chosen case study in more detail, using the skills they have refined over the course of the term.
About Professor LaFay
I am a historian of climate and the body, specializing in the nineteenth-century United States. My current research seeks to understand the entanglements between climatology, medicine, and imperialism.
My first book project, At the Tropics’ Brink: Climates of Disease and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf South, provides a new perspective on American expansion into the southern borderlands. It reveals that U.S. expansion was an imperial experiment, in both senses of the term. Testing scientific ideas about climate, vegetation, and health was central to imperial practice. This knowledge was useful to a diverse set of actors: boosters recruiting white settlers to contested land; both enslavers and enslaved people seeking to shape the built environment of plantations; medical practitioners, white settlers, abolitionists, and formerly enslaved people confronting experiences of debility; and speculators, physicians, and the state promoting popular fantasies about the commercial and medical promise of tropical America. I ultimately argue that settler colonialism was predicated on an experimentalism that turned parts of the tropics into laboratories for bodies and plants. This research has received grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the American Meteorological Society, the Mellon Foundation, and several other institutions.
I am also interested in the history of epidemics; health tourism; disability in antebellum America; the environmental history of death; gender & sexuality; and botanical knowledge in the Atlantic World.
Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, I earned my PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in History with highest honors from the University of Michigan.