Creating Nature: Premodern Climate and the Environmental Humanities (conference)

Scheduled for May 24-26, 2019

This conference, which is currently seeking a "Convening" grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support travel grants for its participants, will bring together premodern environmental humanities scholars to explore the long and varied history of how humans have conceptualized their environment. Its invited speakers will explore historical and cultural forms in which humans have come to terms with their love for, dependence on, and need to manipulate the nonhuman world.

Fourteen distinguished speakers will cluster their conversations around four environmental keywords: "storms," "sustenance," "shelter," and "spirits and science." Together with the conference-goers welcomed into conversation, "Creating Nature" will provide insights into premodern ideas about human entanglement with the nature they knew themselves to be creating and the nature that created them.