Environmental Humanities Research Group, Northumbria

Description

The Environmental Humanities Research Group brings together scholars from across the Department of Humanities and has particular strengths in history, literary studies and creative writing.

The Group has strong links with regional organisations, including the Environment Agency, Northumberland National Park Authority, the Northumberland Wildlife Trust, the National Railway Museum (York) and the Forestry Commission. Members are also involved with international scholarly societies and organisations, including the European Society for Environmental History, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, the Arcadiana blog and the Coastal History Network.

Research areas covered by the Group are:

• the history of national parks, nature conservation and environmental activism;
• cultural and intellectual histories of energy;
• animal studies;
• responses to natural disasters, particularly by religious communities;
• the ecological history of British Empire, particularly Australia and the Caribbean;
• theories of mobility, borders, and landscape;
• the history of sanitation and water and river management from the early modern through to the modern period;
• the poetry and prose of place, nature and human-animal relationships.

Published and forthcoming books by members of the group include environmental histories of the River Tyne, of Dartmoor, of the Los Angeles’s Beaches and of early modern brewing; nature writing memoirs; histories of prayer and natural disaster in the British Empire; a collective biography of women environmental activists in twentieth-century Britain; a study of the literary landscapes of the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands; and an ecocritical study of colonial natural history.

Group’s members have been awarded AHRC and Leverhulme funding and or are involved in AHRC- and Northumberland Wildlife Trust National Lottery-funded projects.

The group runs a reading group, has regular brown bag lunches and has organised a number of academic events, including the 2019 Environmental History Workshop (EHW) conference on the theme of ‘Flows,’ a British Academy-funded conference on ‘Rural Modernism,’ and the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI) in September 2022 on the theme of ‘Epochs, Ages, and Cycles: Times and the Environment’.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

Northumbria University
London