New Books in Environmental Studies
Science:Natural Sciences
W. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s quote has been used for so many purposes, it might be worth remembering what he meant. Auden’s line is importantly from a poem memorializing W.B. Yeats, a politician and a poet. Auden meant that despite Yeats’s poetry, “Ireland [still] has her madness and her weather still.” Yeats’s poetry didn’t stop suffering. But Auden acknowledges that poetry is a “way of happening” that survives and persists. Today’s guest, Caroline Levine, has written a brilliant new book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton UP, 2023). As I read the book, I began asking myself in the manner of Auden: “Does literary criticism make nothing happen? What kind of something might attention to social forms within aesthetic criticism make happen?”
I am excited to talk to Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Previously, she was Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), which won the winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, as well as The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007).
John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.
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Flora Samuel, "Housing for Hope and Wellbeing" (Routledge, 2022)
Richard C. Hoffmann, "The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Erika Marie Bsumek, "The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau" (U Texas Press, 2023)
Cindy McCulligh, "Sewer of Progress: Corporations, Institutionalized Corruption, and the Struggle for the Santiago River" (MIT Press, 2023)
Heather White, "One Green Thing: Discover Your Hidden Power to Help Save the Planet" (Harper Horizon, 2022)
Omolade Adunbi, "Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria" (Indiana UP, 2022)
Sarah E. Vaughn, "Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation" (Duke UP, 2022)
Vincanne Adams, "Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move" (Duke UP, 2023)
Marco Grasso, "From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)
Simone Ferracina, "Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet" (Routledge, 2022)
The Future of Oceans: A Discussion with Chris Armstrong
The Bubble Economy: Is Sustainable Growth Possible?
The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas
Erik Kojola, "Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range" (NYU Press, 2023)
Illuminations Episode 9: Rituals for a Dying World
The Environmental Unconscious
Leela Fernandes, "Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State" (U Washington Press, 2022)
Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Stephen G. Gross, "Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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