Listen to this interview with Gargi Binju, Researcher at the University of Tübingen, about the new collection Literature and Environment: Primary and Critical Sources (Bloomsbury Academic).
From Around the O.
The University of Oregon has received a $4.52 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a new initiative envisioning a transformative research platform for racial and climate justice. It is the largest humanities award in UO history.
The Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice will be a multidisciplinary collaboration between leaders from the UO’s College of Arts and Sciences and College of Design, alongside other partners across campus and institutions in the region, including the University of Idaho and Whitman College. With capacity made possible by the Mellon funding, the institute will tackle the intertwined issues of racial and climate justice and work toward a more just future for the region.
A second award from the Mellon Foundation will expand educational programs for incarcerated Oregonians.
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Center for Environmental Futures
New grant bolsters UO center for environmental humanities
“We are tremendously grateful to the Mellon Foundation for recognizing the innovative thinking of our faculty,” said UO president Michael H. Schill. “This award will support our researchers’ work to address racial and climate justice through a uniquely humanistic lens. It will empower the UO to be a visionary leader in this arena.”
The initiative grew out of the UO’s Center for Environmental Futures in the College of Arts and Sciences, also currently funded by Mellon, and was inspired by an urgent desire to address the ways that the climate crisis and social injustice are raging throughout the Pacific Northwest. The events of summer 2020, including wildfires that forced 40,000 Oregonians to evacuate their homes and protests of racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd, clarified the need to address deep-seated issues stemming from the intersectional problem of racism and climate change.
Those issues have long been concerns of the faculties in the UO’s Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies.
“Oregon has a dark history of racial discrimination,” said John Arroyo, professor of planning, public policy and management and director of the new institute. “The Mellon award will allow the UO and our educational and community-based partners to co-create deep and meaningful equity work that will envision and realize what a just the future looks like for the Pacific Northwest.”
With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the ACLS and the Vice Provost of Research and Innovation at the University of Oregon, my colleague Professor Marsha Weisiger and I are proud to announce the opening of the Center for Environmental Futures, a research hub for the Environmental Humanities at the University of Oregon and beyond.
In Contemporary Literature, Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia University) writes, "LeMenager is one of our most incisive and inventive critics, period, and Living Oil is the cutting edge of what literary and cultural criticism is and might be. It’s the kind of book to recommend to graduate students, regard- less of field, as a model of what’s possible in the discipline, or to keep close at hand for inspiration."
In American Literary History online, Richard Crownshaw (Goldsmith's, University of London) writes: "More than just a social and cultural history of energy use in the US, Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century structures of feeling generated by oil’s centrality to and permeation of American life. Demonstrating exhaustive archival research, Living Oil tracks this feeling and embodiment as it is culturally expressed across a wide range of media, from architectural, town and highway planning to museums, memorials, and heritage sites, graphic novels, novels, and poetry, as well as feature, documentary, and corporate propaganda films, photography (artistic, personal, and public), newspapers, and journals, and new digital and Net-based media."
Looking forward to writing a commissioned essay about oil culture and contexts for the first solo museum presentation of new works by British-Nigerian artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa. At the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, this September. Pictured: Amy Powell, Ryan Dennis, Brooke Anderson, Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Stephanie LeMenager.
Dear Reader,
This site intends to act as a complement to my University of Oregon website and to my profile on Academia.edu. Feel free to write me with any questions or comments either on site or at my professional email address: slemen@uoregon.edu.