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Environmental Humanities Reading Group

2025-26 Reading Group

 

The Umwelt Center for Germanic Studies & Environmental Humanities invites participants from across the Arts and Sciences to a reading group exploring topics and approaches in the environmental humanities. Our theme for this academic year will be Arctic Worlds. Meetings will take place monthly on Fridays 12:30-1:30, and lunch will be provided. 

The inaugural meeting will take place on Friday, November 7, 12:30-1:30 in Hagerty Hall 488. We will discuss Hester Blum’s recent article, “I, Nuligak and Indigenous Arctic Temporalities,” in: After Ice: Cold Humanities for a Warming Planet, eds. Rafico Ruiz, Paula Schönach, and Rob Shields (2025). The article, attached, examines how I, Nuligak (1966), the first published Inuvialuit autobiography, reveals the tension between Indigenous and settler temporalities through its translation and editing by a French missionary. By contrasting Inuvialuit conceptions of time and knowledge with Qablunaat (settler) frameworks, Blum exposes how colonial temporal regulation and mistranslation distort Indigenous understandings of climate, history, and change.  

As the year progresses, we will explore Environmental Humanities in the Arctic through a variety of perspectives, including literary studies, art, anthropology, and history, and investigate work in Greenland, Canada, Iceland, the United States, and Norway. We will also have the opportunity to read works-in-progress, if participants would like to share drafts and receive feedback.  Further meetings will take place on  

  • December 5 
  • January 30 
  • February 27 
  • March 27 
  • April 24 

We hope that you will consider joining us for one or more of these discussions. So that we can plan for a (vegan-friendly) lunch for all, please RSVP to Matthew Birkhold (birkhold.22@osu.edu) by noon on Friday, October 31. 

 

 

2024-25 Reading Group

The Umwelt Center for Germanic Studies & Environmental Humanities invites participants from across the Arts and Sciences to a reading group exploring topics and approaches in the environmental humanities. Our theme for this academic year will be Decomposition: Processes of Decay, Collapse, and Reorganization.  Meetings will take place monthly on Fridays 12:30-1:30, and a vegan-friendly lunch will be provided. 

As the year progresses, we hope that participants will suggest readings, so that our conversations reflect the diverse approaches to the environmental humanities being taken at Ohio State. 

 

Meetings will take place on  

  • October 18 (excerpts from Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (Verzeichnis einiger Verluste)
  • November 22 (Eva Horn's "Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene")
  • January 24 (excerpts from Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
  • April 11 (Jeff Orlowki's Chasing Coral)

 

Questions? Please contact Katra Byram (byram.4@osu.edu).