Environmental Humanities
The environmental humanities are a growing interdisciplinary research field that aims to strengthen the contribution of the humanities to environmental questions. Scholarship within the environmental humanities is anchored in the recognition that “nature” and “the environment” are not self-evident, objective categories, but complex discursive and material entities. Their representation in literature, art, philosophy, film, etc. shapes—and is shaped by—broader debates around ecology, sustainability, resource extraction, progress, globalization, and related categories.
With a focus on North America, we examine how cultural texts influence and problematize particular ideas about human-environment relationships: from constructions of “nature” in the nineteenth century to modernist energy aesthetics and modes of ecotopia and post-apocalypse in contemporary genre fiction (climate fiction, science fiction, ecohorror, petrofiction, new weird, etc.). In response to contemporary debates around ecological crises and critical approaches to the Anthropocene, we engage current developments in science and technology studies, critical theory, mobility studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanist philosophy. Our current research projects include:
Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility
In times of climate crisis, there is wide agreement that we need a more environmental approach to automobility. “Off the Road” addresses this challenge by highlighting a largely forgotten fact: that automobility was a thoroughly environmental experience before the current system of closed cars on concrete roads emerged. This environmental automobility was particularly widespread in the United States, where much driving occurred in off-road conditions well into the 1920s. Motorists navigated through mud, sand, and water, constantly exposed to the elements and acutely aware of their surroundings. Early automobility thus engendered unprecedented modes of relating to the environment—modes that have never been systematically researched.
Led by Timo Müller (PI), the ERC-funded project "Off the Road" recovers this environmental automobility by conceiving it as an aesthetic experience: one that created new sensual perceptions, new strategies of representation, and new formations of environmental knowledge. These aesthetic patterns found their most complex manifestation in road literature. The project assembles researchers from literary studies, environmental history, and the history of knowledge to recover the aesthetics of environmental automobility. (1) It builds an interactive digital corpus of American road literature from 1890 to 1929 to identify the full range of aesthetic strategies employed to render the experience of environmental automobility. (2) It positions these strategies within the modernist aesthetic innovations of the period, thus bringing into view a previously marginalized modernism inspired by slow driving in rural environments. (3) It examines how the aesthetics of automobility generated a new kind of mobile environmental knowledge that shaped environmental activism and the emergent science of ecology. In sum, the project reveals how early automobility created distinct modes of environmental awareness that can help us reconceive mobility today.
Elemental America
This project examines the role of material elements in the formation of American subjectivities and cultural narratives. Taking its cue from materialist ecocriticism, elemental media theory, and the energy humanities, the project apprehends American elements—from hurricanes and dust to oil, carbon, plutonium, or plastic—as not an ontological given or passive background but as themselves the products and producers of cultural texts and material metaphors.
- Results have been published as a special issue in ZAA, edited by Moritz Ingwersen and Timo Müller, in 2022.
Hip Hop Ecologies
A field-defining workshop on hip hop ecologies convened online in February 2021. The results have been published a as a special issue of Ecozon@, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand and Timo Müller, in 2022.
Wissenschaftliche Zeitlichkeiten der Moderne im Spiegel des Anthropozäns
Co-organized by Moritz Ingwersen, this workshop for early-career scholars examined modern conceptions of time and temporality as central to interdisciplinary dialogues between the humanities and the natural sciences in the context of the Anthropocene. With a focus on the long nineteenth century, the aim was to investigate how literature and the arts have responded to the resonances, tensions, and pluralities among conceptions of temporality and time in disciplines that include history, geology, physics, anthropology, and biology. Keynote speakers came from the fields of media theory, literary studies, and history.
Energy Infrastructures in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
In her post-doc project “Energy Infrastructures in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press” (working title), Julia Ditter examines the representations of energy infrastructures in the nineteenth-century Anglophone periodical press. She posits that the periodical press of the nineteenth century played a central role in the creation of systems and epistemologies of energy that continue to structure our understanding of and relationship with energy today. In particular, she is interested in the affordances of the periodical as a miscellaneous literary form for creating and negotiating energy imaginaries, the connections between energy infrastructures and the British Empire, and how understanding these imaginaries and connections may help us grapple with our relationship with energy today.