Academic study associated with environmental studies — or the environmental humanities — now has a legacy of many decades and embraces an extraordinary and ever-growing range of topics, methods, and practices. We strive to understand and where possible change the habits, beliefs, knowledge, ethics, values, practices and institutions that brought us to our present dilemmas. We consider patterns of thought, action, and representation, both very recent and stretching back millennia.

Our faculty engage in science and technology studies; climate and environmental history; the anthropology of energy systems and transitions; the sociologies of toxicity; climate vulnerability; the increasingly wide and varied impacts of waste; environmental justice and environmental racism; the study of infrastructure and the practice of sustainable design in both urban and coastal contexts; philosophies and theologies of disaster and recovery; extreme weather; the cultural ideas of biodiversity and the impact of thinking about extinction; the different horizons of expectation and theories of survival embedded in terms like sustainability, adaptation, and resilience. We present, commission, and create arts and media engaging with the immediacy and lived experience of energy, ecology, climate, disaster, storms, waste and more.