Exploring Environmental Humanities with the Senate House Library

Exploring Environmental Humanities

Following on from A Thousand Words for Weather and the Weather Notes exhibition at Senate House Library, this online event explored resources, themes, and potential research areas in environmental humanities across the collections. 

The session included presentations from researchers in the field and case studies drawing on the Library’s holdings covering subjects including environmental movements, nature printing and sources for environmental history. 

Land, development, and the Anthropocene in the Goldsmiths Library of Economic Literature (Tansy Barton, Academic Librarian: Manuscript and Print Studies)

This case study will look at sources for environmental history in the Goldsmiths Library Collection focusing on changing landscapes and relationships with the land through works in the collection from the 17th to the 20th century.

Nature printing and seaweed mania in Victorian England (Suzanne Canally, Senior Library Assistant)

It’s the summer of 1865. You’re a young woman on a seaside holiday in the UK, which means that it’s raining. TikTok won't be invented for another 151 years. How do you pass the time? You go seaweed-hunting. This is a nine-minute loose intro into the world of those “algologists”. Shallow wicker baskets, short woollen petticoats and kid balmoral boots at the ready!

Environmental activism: leafing through the Archives (Mura Ghosh, Academic Librarian: Philosophy, Psychology, Social Sciences, and Leila Kassir, Academic Librarian: British, US, Commonwealth, Latin American and Caribbean Literature)

In this case study we will browse archival folders and examine what they reveal about mass nonviolent protests in the 20th century using the examples of the London Committee of 100 and the Greenham Common Women Peace Camp.

Languages of the Ineffable: Reading apophatic poetics in a time of environmental crisis (Dr Enaiê Mairê Azambuja, Fellow in Environmental Humanities, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London)

My research concerns the relationship between negative (apophatic) poetic language and the environment. The use of negation and absence in poetry foregrounds the insufficiency of human language to represent or express ineffable more-than-human realities. I argue that the language of negation and absence in poetry provides a new form of environmental experience that heightens the awareness of our planetary entanglement with more-than-human beings and environments. As it extensively benefits from books and articles available at Senate House Library, my work will serve as a case study exploring the numerous online and in-print resources available within the fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics.