Humanities Matter: Ecological Crossroads, Past, Present, and Future
All conference participants are invited to attend a concluding gala dinner with keynote speakers and guests on August 31 (Saturday).
Students who register for the conference may also attend an exclusive seminar with one of the keynote speakers.
Register to attend the conference here by 26th Aug.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2024
08:30-09:00 Breakfast and Registration
AB1079
09:00-09:15 OPENING CEREMONY
AB1079 Carlos Rojas, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University
Selina Lai-Henderson, Associate Professor of American Literature & History, DKU
Scott MacEachern, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, DKU
John A. Quelch, Executive Vice Chancellor, DKU
09:15-10:45 KEYNOTE LECTURE 1: Shen Hou, “An Evolving Blue Planet: Writing about Ocean History in a Planetary Age”
AB1079 Chair: Joseph Giacomelli
10:45-11:00 Coffee Break
Stream A:
11:00-12:00 KEYNOTE BREAKOUT SESSION WITH SHEN HOU
AB3101
Stream B:
11:00-12:30 FACULTY PANEL 1: Plastics, Cities, and Borderlands: Thinking through History, Race, and Belongings
AB1079 Nellie Chu: “Ecologies of Plastics: Dupont Corporation and the Birth of Synthetics during World War II”
Keping Wu: “Materiality and Multivalence of Water: Environmental Encounters of Indigenous Peoples in Sino-Tibetan-Burmese Borderlands”
Renee Richer & Lorenzo Maggio Laquidara: “Citizens, Cities, and Nature: Humanities as a Tool to Investigate Environmental Attitudes in Segregated Urban Contexts”
Chair: Zach Fredman
12:30-14:00 LUNCH
Community Center
14:00-15:30 KEYNOTE LECTURE 2: Brian Roberts: “Archipelagic Thinking and the Environmental Humanities”
AB1079 Chair: Selina Lai-Henderson
15:30-15:45 Coffee Break
Stream A:
15:45-16:45 KEYNOTE BREAKOUT SESSION WITH BRIAN ROBERTS
AB3101
Stream B:
15:45-17:15 FACULTY PANEL 2: When Poetry Meets Space and Chinese Modernity: The Tightrope of Confucianism, Children, and Buddhism
AB1079 Stephanie Anderson: “A Reading of Poetry & Fiction”
Ben Van Overmeire: “Inner and Outer Space in the Thought of the Buddhist Modernist Alan Watts”
Qian Zhu: “Civilizing China in Everyday Life: New Villages and Harmonious Modernity, 1928-1936”
Chair: Yitzhak Lewis
17:30-18:30 NEW SPACE LAUNCH
AB1075A
19:00 Dinner for Faculty and Guests
SATURDAY, AUGUST 31
08:30-09:00 Breakfast
AB1079
09:00-10:30 KEYNOTE PANEL 1: Visualizing Environmental Change
AB1079 Panelists: Joseph Giacomelli, Binbin Li, and Chi Yeung Choi
Chair: Selina Lai-Henderson
10:30-10:45 Coffee Break
10:45-12:15 KEYNOTE PANEL 2: Pedagogy for Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Approach
AB1079 Panelists: James Miller, Coraline Goron, Renee Richer, Wumeng He, Joseph Giacomelli
Chair: Carlos Rojas
12:30-14:00 Lunch
Community Center
14:00-15:30 KEYNOTE LECTURE 3: Erika Weinthal: “Protecting the Environment and Infrastructure during War: Humanitarian Challenges”
AB1079 Chair: Carlos Rojas
15:30-15:45 Coffee Break
Stream A:
15:45-16:45 KEYNOTE BREAKOUT SESSION WITH ERIKA WEINTHAL
AB3101
Stream B:
15:45-17:15 FACULTY PANEL 3: Artifice, Mud, Theater, and Christianity: Ecological Implications
AB1079 Anna Greenspan (NYUSH): “The Nature of Artifice & Gardens Unbound”
Jennifer Egloff (NYUSH): “Humanity’s Responsibility for ‘Natural’ Disasters: Parallels Between Early Modern Providence to the Contemporary Carbon Footprint”
Erica Mukherjee (NYUSH): “Thinking with Mud: A Comparative Approach”
Jennifer Nan Dong (NYUSH): “Beyond Disney Musical The Lion King and Chinese Dance Drama The Soaring Wings: A Glimpse of How Contemporary Theatre Addresses Ecological Sustainability Concerns”
Chair: Adrien Pouille
17:30-18:30 Closing reception
Water Celebration of Faculty Publications
Pavilion
18:30 Banquet
Executive Dining Hall
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS BIOS
Shen Hou is a professor of environmental history in the History Department, Peking University, Beijing, junior Yangtze River Scholar. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2011 and 2013. She is the author of The City Natural: Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism (English, 2013), and Cities without Walls: Nature and Urban Places in American History (Chinese, 2021). She has published around 50 articles, essays, and book reviews in Chinese and English, and is the translator of Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (2018) and Planet of Desire: Earth in the Age of Humans (2024). She is currently finishing a book on Boston’s environmental history and working on a book project about coastal cities.
Brian Russell Roberts is a Professor of English and Director of the English Graduate Program at Brigham Young University, where his scholarship and teaching have focused on American studies, archipelagic and oceanic studies, African American literature, modernism/modernity, and the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in in journals including American Literature, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA, and he has received the Darwin T. Turner Award for best article of the year in African American Review. His books include Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Virginia, 2013), Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke, 2016), Archipelagic American Studies (Duke, 2017), and Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (Duke, 2021). He has worked in Indonesian-to-English literary translation, translating fiction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Sitor Situmorang. His own work on archipelagic American studies has been translated into Spanish, and his book Borderwaters appeared in Russian translation in 2023.
Erika Weinthal is a Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy and a member of the Bass Society of Fellows at Duke University. She specializes in global environmental politics and environmental security with an emphasis on water and energy. She is author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia (MIT Press 2002), which received the 2003 Chadwick Alger Prize and the 2003 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize. She co-authored Oil is not a Curse (Cambridge University Press 2010) and Water Quality Impacts of the Energy-Water Nexus (Cambridge University Press 2022). She has co-edited Water and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Shoring Up Peace (2014), The Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy (Oxford University Press 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (2023). She is also a founding Vice President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and an associate editor at Environment & Security. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015”.
PANELIST BIOS
Stephanie Anderson is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at Duke Kunshan University. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Bearings, as well as the editor of Women in Independent Publishing. Her scholarly and creative work has recently appeared in Post45, Textual Practice, Fence Steaming, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.
Chi-Yeung (Jimmy) Choi is an applied ecologist with expertise in animal ecology, conservation biology, wetland ecology and environmental management. He studies the relationship between animals and their environment. Current study systems include the ecology of migratory birds, with a focus on their foraging and movement ecology within and between coastal intertidal wetlands.
Jimmy has published in leading conservation journals including Conservation Letters, Conservation Biology and Biological Conservation. He has served as an editorial board member for Avian Research and Stilt, and an associate editor for Journal of Applied Ecology. He was appointed as a specialist by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China, Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands Conservation Foundation and the Zhilan Foundation.
Jimmy has a B.Sc. (1st class honors) in biological ecology from the University of New South Wales (Australia), an M.Sc. in ecology from Fudan University (China) and a Ph.D. in ecology from Massey University (New Zealand). Before joining Duke Kunshan, he worked at the University of Queensland (postdoctoral research fellow), Deakin University (associate research fellow) and Southern University of Science and Technology (research assistant professor).
Nellie Chu teaches Cultural Anthropology, Global China Studies, and Global Cultural Studies at DKU. Her work focuses on global supply chains, fast fashion, urbanisation, migration, and labor. She has published in positions: east asia critique, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique, and the Journal of Modern Craft.
Jennifer Nan Dong: Teaching fellow and specialist in academic activities at New York University Shanghai, Business. Before joining NYU Shanghai, she worked for the Shanghai Disney Resort Grand Opening Team as a dancer and served an auditor focusing on entertainment industry. Jennifer is also a producer, a translator and a performer. Her theatre productions were presented at many International Arts Festivals.
Jennifer Egloff earned her PhD in Early Modern Atlantic History and the History of Science from NYU New York. Combining her undergraduate training in Mathematics with her graduate training in History, Egloff’s research explores multivalent ways that Anglophone individuals utilized numerical methods and mathematical techniques to confront challenges brought on by the opening of the Atlantic to increased exploration and commerce, competing religious philosophies, and the increased availability of information. Her current book project has the working title, Apocalyptic Atlantic: Elite and Popular Eschatology in Early Modern England and British North America. A strong advocate of interdisciplinarity, Egloff teaches History, Writing, and Mathematics at NYU Shanghai.
Joseph Giacomelli is an assistant professor of environmental history at Duke Kunshan University. His research focuses on environmental history and the history of science, primarily in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. His book Uncertain Climes (2023) examines late 1800s cultural and political struggles over climate change. Currently, Joseph is researching more recent histories of weather modification.
Coraline Goron is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and co-director of DKU 102. She holds a double PhD Degree in Politics from the University of Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Before coming to DKU, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Oxford University China Center in 2018-2019. Her research centers on environmental politics with a specific focus on China, both domestically and as an increasingly influential actor in global environmental governance. Her recent scientific publications include “From targets to inspections: the issue of fairness in China’s environmental policy implementation”, with Genia Kostka (EP, 2020) and “Becoming Scientific-Environmental Citizens Through Citizen Science in China”, with Anna Lora-Wainwright and Shuling Huang (STHV, 2024). Professor Goron is also a co-leader of the DKU sustainability initiative and a professor in the iMEP program.
Anna Greenspan is an Associate Professor of Global Contemporary Media at NYU Shanghai. She is also Co-Director of NYU Shanghai’s Center of AI and Culture. Anna maintains a website at annagreenspan@gmail.com
Wumeng He’s research explores the interactions between human behaviors, government policy and the environment in the context of developing countries, with special interests in land use, conservation, natural resource management and rural development. Trained as an economist with a strong interdisciplinary background, he is particularly interested in incorporating economic thinking with non-economic methodology. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan University include environmental and resource economics, environmental policy analysis and the statistics of program evaluation.
He has a B.A. in environmental studies from Brown University, an M.A. in economics from New York University and a Ph.D. in environmental policy from Duke University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was an assistant professor at Wuhan University.
Maggio Laquidara received his B.A. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Duke Kunshan University, and is now a PhD student at North Carolina State University’s Forestry and Natural Resources Program. His key research interest is understanding the ways historical race and class segregation practices impact modern-day ecosystem service distribution in South U.S. cities. He is also interested in understanding how low-income immigrant communities navigate marginalization in the U.S. and Europe, especially in his native Italy.
Binbin Li is an Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences at Duke Kunshan University and holds a secondary appointment with Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Her research focuses on the intersection of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, particularly under climate change. She employs innovative technology, market tools, citizen science, and policy to address conservation challenges.
Dr. Li has received numerous accolades, including being named an EC50 by the Explorers Club. She holds leadership roles in various IUCN commissions and is actively involved in science communication and nature education. She holds a PhD in Environment from Duke University, an M.S. in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. in Life Sciences and Economics from Peking University.
James Miller is Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Initiatives and Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University. He is a scholar of Daoism, China’s indigenous religion, and in particular Daoist views of nature and the environment. He has published three monographs and four editor or co-edited volumes, and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Environment.
Erica Mukherjee is a historian of mud and empire. Her research examines the application of East India Company land revenue legislation in the Bengal Delta from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. She is a clinical assistant professor of history at New York University-Shanghai and a co-founder of Elemental Histories, a public environmental history project in Manchester, UK.
Ben Van Overmeire is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke Kunshan University. A comparatist, he examines how premodern Zen Buddhist genres and ideas are understood today, particularly in popular literature. His first book, American Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature, will appear in the Fall of 2024 with the University of Virginia Press. This book describes how and why American Zen autobiographical narratives incorporate koan, Zen riddles revolving around seemingly unsolvable questions such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” His current book project examines the Buddhist imagination of outer space by examining astronaut memoirs and space opera novels in tandem. Apart from this, he has also published on the appearance of Zen tropes in modern detective fiction. His work has appeared in Religions, Contemporary Buddhism, The Journal of Popular Culture, Buddhist-Christian Studies, and Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies, among other journals. Chapters have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism; The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Buddhism. He is a review editor for H-Buddhism, and apart from this his reviews have appeared in The Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Twentieth-Century China, and online on Reading Religion. Van Overmeire has presented his work at the annual conferences of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Modern Languages Association (MLA), and the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). For more about him, visit his personal website at https://benvanovermeire.wordpress.com.
Renee Richer is currently an Associate Professor of Biology at Duke Kunshan University, China. Her work is in the field of physiological ecology, with emphasis on the impacts of climate change. She has worked extensively in semi-arid to hyper-arid environments addressing plant and biological soil crust ecology. Her teaching interests include biology and environmental science. She has edited a book on developing university courses for environment, development and sustainability studies and recently published a guide to the flora of Qatar (Akkadia Press). Richer has a B.A. in biology (with honors) from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University.
Keping Wu is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research touches upon religion, charity and urbanization in China. She is the co-author of Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies (Cambridge 2017).
Qian Zhu holds a Ph.D in history from New York University. She is a historian of 20th century China, whose research areas include history of the Chinese left, intellectual history of modern China, history of Chinese feminism, and social theory of everyday life. Her first book is on Chinese leftism and culture, and she is currently writing a book on grassroots community building and public housing in China in 1920s-1940s.
KEYNOTE SPEECH ABSTRACTS
Shen Hou, “An Evolving Blue Planet: Writing about Ocean History in a Planetary Age”
The ocean is a place which has been long forgotten by historians. The history written by us is often exclusively terrestrial and dusty. Even the works about human experiences on the sea usually tell stories happening on the continental edges—the floating land—like trading, voyaging, or warring at sea, while the oceans vanish again. In our common understanding, oceans are infinite, mysterious, and eternal; therefore, oceans have no history. Yet, oceans are not only a massive waterbody covering 2/3 of the earth’s surface, they are also the place where life first appeared, the place which continues to create new lives all the time. Their evolution has been entangled with the evolution of the blue planet and of all lives including Homo Sapiens. The beginning of life is one point where history begins. As modern science has brought us into a planetary age of knowledge, making us acknowledge that all organisms and non-organisms have been interdependent and intertwined, historians and scholars in humanities have had to realize that the human terrestrial past has been deeply interwoven with the existence and evolution of oceans. Shades of blue, not green, ought to become the new color for environmental history and humanities, from which we can find new ways to understand the creation of the modern world and new possibilities to practice inter-disciplinary research.
In this talk, I will use the Pacific Ocean and its relationship with coastal cities along its rim to explore the complex relationship between oceans and human history. We can see, on the one hand, how modern science has changed the boundary and content of historical studies and other relevant fields of humanities; on the other hand, how oceans have shaped human history and been transformed by new technologies, values, and new human desires.
Brian Russell Roberts, “Archipelagic Thinking in the Environmental Humanities”
This lecture offers an overview of some intersections between the environmental humanities and what the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant and others have described as archipelagic thinking, or thinking that finds thought templates and collaborators in the notion and materiality of ocean-island spaces. In so doing, the lecture traces the pivotal and provocative roles that islands and oceans have assumed in the work of key EH thinkers. As a case study for the role of archipelagic thinking in the environmental humanities, the lecture examines the question of oceanic plastic pollution as it surfaces in the United States’ marine national monuments, the failed anti-littering campaigns advanced by US corporations, the British writer A. S. Byatt’s short story “Sea Story.” Marine plastic pollution, as it is strewn across these interrelated cultural formations and institutions, coalesces into a material form and critical thought experiment: albatross-curated archives of the Anthropocene.
PAPER ABSTRACTS
FACULTY PANEL 1: Plastics, Cities, and Borderlands: Thinking through History, Race, and Belongings
Nellie Chu, “Ecologies of Plastics, Dupont Corporation and the Birth of Synthetics during World War II”
Recent debates and scholarly studies have unveiled the long-term damage that plastics pose upon the environment and global health. Microplastics and “forever chemicals” attest to the detrimental effects that stem from consumers’ long-standing dependence on plastics, while highlighting the ways in which global capitalism continues to rely on the mass production and consumption of plastic materials. My paper explores the historical background behind our global reliance on plastic materials, with a particular focus on E. I. Du Pont De Nemours & Company (Dupont’s) invention of nylon in the United States during the late 1930s. I examine how rising nationalism and economic competition with Japan during World War II laid the foundation for the mass production of nylon and other synthetic materials, which range from women’s stockings to parachutes, ropes, and other combat equipment for the U.S. military. This historical context, I argue, compelled scientists and industrialists to manipulate and re-construct nature through the invention of so-called man-made materials. Through this historical sketch, I then briefly introduce my second book project on bio-synthetics in China, Japan, and the U.S, and their relationships with the natural world.
Keping Wu, “Materiality and Multivalence of Water: Environmental Encounters of Indigenous Peoples in Sino-Tibetan-Burmese Borderlands”
Despite global NGOs’ protest dam building on the Salween River in Sino-Tibetan-Burmese Borderlands, why was there little local activism against dams among the indigenous population? This paper offers an explanation by addressing the multivalence of water in an indigenous celebration that has been marked as National Intangible Cultural Heritage. Divergent from the state that regards water as an economic resource and NGOs that upheld water as sacrality of the environment, the indigenous peoples of Nu, Dulong, Lisu, and Tibetan origins here celebrate the March Festival mainly as a fertility ritual in which the water from the mountains nourishes and heals the community. Water and indigenous communities engage in a “co-becoming” through the media of mountains, caves and human bodies. Due to the lack of such material and intimate transactions with the Salween River, the dams’ potential adverse effects on the living environment are not directly experienced or cognitively registered.
Lorenzo Maggio Laquidara & Renee Richer, “Citizens, Cities, and Nature: Humanities as a Tool to Investigate Environmental Attitudes in Segregated Urban Contexts”
Individual attitudes about urban nature can be surprisingly diverse. In US cities, socioeconomic status (SES) and racial/ethnic identity have been found to inform environmental attitudes profoundly. While high-SES White majorities seem to view urban beautification as a policy priority, urban green spaces often rank low among among low-SES residents and Black and Brown minorities’ policy interests. In Jim Crow South, redlining practices concentrated public investments in White neighborhoods, diverting infrastructural development away from Black communities. Currently, urban green space developments tend to displace Black and Brown communities by accelerating gentrification processes. Urban green space literature devotes much effort to measuring urban green space quality, health, and accessibility, but few studies gauge resident attitudes on urban nature directly. Could history, sociology, and anthropology provide the necessary conceptual and methodological frameworks to investigate citizen-nature interactions in segregated cities? This presentation wishes to address this question, drawing examples by existing literature and the authors’ previous and current research.
FACULTY PANEL 2: When Poetry Meets Space and Chinese Modernity: The Tightrope of Confucianism, Children, and Buddhism
Stephanie Anderson, “A Reading of Poetry & Fiction”
Stephanie Anderson will read from her recent poetry chapbook, Bearings, and from new prose work.
Ben Van Overmiere: “Inner and Outer Space in the Thought of the Buddhist Modernist Alan Watts”
Among the manifold of figures who interpreted Asian philosophy for western audiences in the twentieth century, Alan Watts (1915-1973) was among most prolific and influential. Sadly, Watts’ work remains understudied, perhaps exactly because he took on so many topics. One of these topics is his connection of the exploration of outer space to the exploration of consciousness or inner space. In programmatic works such as The Joyous Cosmology (1962), the autobiographical narration of an LSD trip with a preface by Timothy Leary, Watts argues that outer space needs to be thought together with inner space. In his unedited lectures, Watts elaborated his argument supporting this position. Watts examines “space” as something that is beyond conceptualization: just like we cannot quite “get” outer space (because, as he argues, space is not a “thing”), we cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness. While making this argument, Watts often draws upon astrophysical knowledge of the known universe to dismiss materialist and nihilist approaches to the problem of the meaning of human existence. At the same time, he also draws on Asian traditions, mainly the Mahayana Buddhist notion of mutual interpenetration articulated in the Flower Garland Sutra and Zen riddles called koan, to build a new eco-spiritual version of planetarity where human consciousness is an important component of material reality itself.
Qian Zhu, “Civilizing China in Everyday Life: New Villages and Harmonious Modernity, 1928-1936”
This paper investigates the planning and mechanism of state-sponsored public housing projects—new villages for the commoners—to house war and flood refugees and urbanites in Shanghai from 1928 to 1936. These projects, which aimed to create a modern lifestyle for the masses, were imagined and materialized in response to crises of capital accumulation, the displacement of labor, and processes of urbanization. In Shanghai’s new village projects, sociospatial relations are produced through perpetual, conflict-laden interactions between opposed spatial strategies to overcome class antagonism caused by the alienation of labor under capitalism. Whereas the state and capital attempt to “pulverize” space into a manageable, calculable, and abstract grid, they simultaneously attempt to create or extend spaces of everyday life as where civilization through teaching was realized. Physical spaces of the new villages were created to achieve “the unity of the heaven and human beings”—the Confucian doctrine of “the Great Harmony.” These settlements sought to rationalize and coordinate practices on a national scale, accelerating the pace of modernization in places that were perceived as lagging behind. Through these major “livelihood” projects, the Nationalist government would exhibit the party’s power and to obtain an international reputation of “modern harmonious Chinese nation.”
FACULTY PANEL 3: Artifice, Mud, Theater, and Christianity: Ecological Implications
Anna Greenspan, “The Nature of Artifice & Gardens Unbound”
Contemporary culture is riddled with anxieties about the artificial. We fear crises from an immersive artificial environment and are apprehensive of the increasing powers of AI. This project seeks to confront this sense of foreboding, of a looming threat to the natural world, through the study of gardens.
For thousands of years across a myriad of cultures, gardens have functioned as a site of experimentation between nature and artifice. Gardens are, as Shakespeare writes, ‘an art that nature “makes.”
“The Nature of Artifice” focuses on the garden arts at seven specific sites around the world, treating each as an expression of a particular moment in intellectual history in which experiments with material elements (soil, sun, rocks, water, plants) combine with changing socio-economic conditions, as well as variations in the aesthetic cultures of taste and design. Ultimately, the goal is a shift in mood, from fear, anxiety and apprehension to wonder, an affect or emotion tied to terror but also to reverence and awe.
This talk will outline this new research project while also introducing “Gardens Unbound,” a larger collaborative project across NYU’s global sites, which involves the creation of a rooftop garden at NYU Shanghai.
Jennifer Egloff, “Humanity’s Responsibility for ‘Natural’ Disasters: Parallels Between Early Modern Providence and the Contemporary Carbon Footprint”
Few images induce pathos as quickly as families begging for help from their rooftops during floods, newborn babies suffering from pneumonia due to poor air quality, or emaciated polar bears searching for food on melting glaciers. The messaging accompanying these images often blames this, and other suffering caused by global warming and pollution, on humanity’s greed, vanity, and decadence. While the notion of man-made climate change is relatively new, the idea that human beings are responsible for natural disasters is not. During the early modern period (c. 1500-1800), Western Christians interpreted natural disasters as providential punishments—signs from God that they needed to repair their sinful ways or face even greater calamities. My presentation discusses parallels between early modern providential explanations of natural disasters and contemporary fear-and-blame tactics that portray one’s carbon footprint as a secular “sin,” with the implication that if they do not “repent” all of humanity will face dire consequences.
Erica Mukherjee, “Thinking With Mud: A Comparative Approach”
What happens when one accepts mud as a conceptual framework? My research is about the relationship between eighteenth-century British imperial legislation meant to create a permanent system of land taxation, and the watery landscapes of the Bengal Delta that resisted such codification. As such, I spend a lot of time thinking with mud. My paper will explore the process and outcome of this practice through a comparative approach.
From historic, textual mud found in the archives of the East India Company to my own intimate, embodied relationship with the substance, mud reveals itself, in turn, as dangerous, playful, radical, and romantic. It is at once a state and a process. Such an encompassing conceptual framework welcomes environmental humanists to embrace ambiguity both within archival sources and their interpretation thereof.
Jennifer Nan DONG, “Beyond Disney Musical The Lion King and Chinese Dance Drama The Soaring Wings: A Glimpse of How Contemporary Theatre Addresses Ecological Sustainability Concerns”
Circle of Life, the opening chant from Disney’s Musical The Lion King, is probably the most distinctive sound of theatre history. Sung in Zulu, a home language in South Africa, it’s hard for audience worldwide to understand the language but not hard to be filled with tears. That is the power of theatre. The musical further interprets the chanting when Mufasa says to Simba, “Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance … respect all creatures.” What if this balance is not respected? The Chinese Dance Drama The Soaring Wings conveys a similar concern through a love story of human and crested ibis. The threat to the planet seems to lurk just off stage. This paper studies theatre in conversation with ecology by exploring the environmental ethics in theatre, varied from commercial productions to artistic practice. The relationship between human body and the planet body is examined to verify how theatre and performing arts address ecological sustainability concerns and operate as a test field for confronting ecological complexities.
EXHIBITS AND VISUAL PRESENTATIONS
Photograph Exhibit:
Binbin Li, “Notices”
(Curated with message by students Sue Wang, Feiyang Zhou, Muqiu Tian, and Chengxi Yin)
When the lens—a mimetic eye—fixes on the eyes of the wildlife, where does the power of observation go?
– The person who holds the camera, or the creatures in front of it?
– People who stand in front of the photographs, or what is in the frame?
“Notices” is a reflection on the reciprocal awareness between species, where the act of observing and being observed intertwines, blurring the line between humans (What does it even mean to be human?) and wildlife. The exhibition invites us to contemplate our place in the Anthropocene: even with the power to inscribe, photograph, and record, humanity is no longer the center of action. The images of nature mirror our own visage, encouraging us to see ourselves not as separate from the wild, but as kin, intricately connected in the fabric of life. The relationship of noticing and being noticed becomes a bridge, co-authoring a shared narrative that transcends the boundaries of species. The blurring of the boundary between the observer and the observed
calls us to consider the deeper connections that bind us all.
Art Piece:
Nick Nie, “Hike Me”
Luce Irigaray argues that women constitute a paradox, if not a contradiction, within the discourse of identity itself; woman remains several. The undesignatability of Women can somehow find itself compatible with the treatise of Ludwig Wittgenstein, that “The limits of my language means the limits of my world”. What exists beyond the “world” of humans is the cosmos, which I regard as the ultimate representation of Women: multiple, the ceaseless exchange of herself with the other, and parallels, as the existences are unidentifiable within themselves. Women envelop the earth, a womb with sphericity.
Mankind always has an uprush of conquering nature, in this case, mountains, and it is always galvanizing to know how much mankind is appealed to the affinity of the peaks, despite their danger. In my vision, they are perceived as pursuits of taboo excitement, or like sex. Also, the peak and even the whole mountain became feminized as soon as it was conquered. From that macro point of entry, I add in multiple elements such as the man and the divine calling to create an abstract sense of the mountain peak and its ramifications. To make it more interactive, l use a straightforward foam board to give the audience a sense of creating mountains, I encourage them to think not only about how height is created through comparison but also about how frivolous and random acts are powerfully affecting our surroundings. Hopefully, this piece can provide people with a unique way of getting insights into our relationships with nature and the possible extension into multiple fields related to the symbolism of a mountain peak in a cosmic backdrop.
Video Installation:
Chi-Yeung (Jimmy) Choi, “The Promise to Return”
(Reimagined and executed by student curators Davit Kavkasyan, and Aastha Mangla)
Although the coastal wetlands of China, Russia, Alaska, New Zealand, and Australia are separated by hundreds and thousands of miles, they are connected by millions of migratory waterbirds that travel between these wetlands annually and tirelessly. When the spring and fall migration seasons come, migratory birds fly over mountains and cross the sea, fearless of storm and rain, day and night, chasing after the call from their hearts. Some people compare this persistence to a promise: a promise to return.
China’s coastal wetlands are an important stopover region for migrating birds, providing energy supplies for their long, sleepless flights, acting like a petrol station along a highway. However, the excessive destruction of intertidal wetlands over the past 50 years has led to the disappearance of more than half of the coastal wetlands, and the migratory waterbird population plummeted.
In addition to providing homes for migratory birds, coastal wetlands also play an important role in purifying water, preventing floods and mitigating disasters, as well as supporting sustainable fisheries. Therefore, there is an urgent need to conserve the wetlands for both people and migratory waterbirds.
These videos were taken not only for our research on the migration ecology of birds but also to leave our future generation a record of these beautiful creatures, in case the birds can no longer keep their promise and eventually become extinct.
Brian Russell Roberts is a Professor of English and Director of the English Graduate Program at Brigham Young University, where his scholarship and teaching have focused on American studies, archipelagic and oceanic studies, African American literature, modernism/modernity, and the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in in journals including American Literature, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA, and he has received the Darwin T. Turner Award for best article of the year in African American Review. His books include Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Virginia, 2013), Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke, 2016), Archipelagic American Studies (Duke, 2017), and Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (Duke, 2021). He has worked in Indonesian-to-English literary translation, translating fiction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Sitor Situmorang. His own work on archipelagic American studies has been translated into Spanish, and his book Borderwaters appeared in Russian translation in 2023.
History Department, Peking University, Beijing, junior Yangtze River Scholar. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2011 and 2013. She is the author of The City Natural: Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism (English, 2013), and Cities without Walls: Nature and Urban Places in American History (Chinese, 2021). She has published around 50 articles, essays, and book reviews in Chinese and English, and is the translator of Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (2018) and Planet of Desire: Earth in the Age of Humans (2024). She is currently finishing a book on Boston’s environmental history and working on a book project about coastal cities.
Erika Weinthal is a Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy and a member of the Bass Society of Fellows at Duke University. She specializes in global environmental politics and environmental security with an emphasis on water and energy. She is author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia (MIT Press 2002), which received the 2003 Chadwick Alger Prize and the 2003 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize. She co-authored Oil is not a Curse (Cambridge University Press 2010) and Water Quality Impacts of the Energy-Water Nexus (Cambridge University Press 2022). She has co-edited Water and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Shoring Up Peace (2014), The Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy (Oxford University Press 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (2023). She is also a founding Vice President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and an associate editor at Environment & Security. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015”.
