This course will explore how questions of time and space shape our thinking about climate change, and vice versa. What do the present and future of climate change look like, and how does that affect our comprehension of scale and distance, our perception of time, and our models for living? What histories does climate change push us to explore? What kinds of narrative does it inspire? How can we see and sense something as vast, diffuse, and long-term as climate change? How does it alter relationships between humans and the nonhuman world, as well as among humans? And what kinds of research and creativity does it demand of us?
This class will take an environmental humanities perspective, considering how the humanities speak to global environmental crisis and what changes that crisis might provoke in humanities scholarship and study. As we read, research and think together about possible futures for an injured planet, we will synthesize scholarly rigor with imagination, creativity, and innovation.
About Dana Luciano
Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses in queer studies, environmental humanities, and nineteenth-century American literature. Recent publications include Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson; “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen (spring/summer 2015); and essays in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Reading the Anthropocene: Literary History in Geologic Times (Penn State University Press, 2017). She is currently at work on two monographs: How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth Century U.S., and Time and Again: The Affective Circuits of Spirit Photography.