Environmental Humanities Project (EHP)
The Environmental Humanities Project (EHP) is an interdisciplinary forum dedicated to exploring environmental imaginations and knowledge systems. Grounded in the belief that cultural analysis, historical inquiry, and philosophical critique are essential to understanding and addressing environmental issues, the EHP brings together graduate students, faculty, practitioners, and scholars from Stanford and beyond through a series of methodological workshops, guest series, and work-in-progress labs. As the central hub for the Stanford Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities, the EHP encourages ongoing dialogue and exploration of novel methodological approaches that enhance our collective understanding of environmental challenges.
EHP events are open to the public and do not require enrollment, though RSVP is appreciated for planning purposes. Graduate students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities must enroll in DLCL 304: Environmental Humanities Colloquium to receive academic credit for participating in the EHP series.
2026-27 Quarterly Themes:
Fall: Hydrofeminisms
We are, each of us, bodies of water–circulating in multiplicity, connected to other humans, more-than-humans, and the ecosystems and infrastructures that hold and move us. Following Astrida Neimanis' hydrofeminist invitation, the EHP asks us to acknowledge our watery embodiment and to trace how water connects us to others, often in contradictory and unequal terms. This framing requires us to reckon with colonial and patriarchal histories of damming, diverting, extracting, and policing water and bodies, as well as to imagine other futures. Our inquiry this quarter begins with three questions: What forms of knowledge, archive, history, and futurity become possible when water connects us all? How do swimming, diving, walking, crafting, and storytelling become embodied, sensory ways of knowing and of making theory? What ethics of care, repair, and solidarity can we practice with water?
Winter: The Botany of Sound
We often understand nature as a silent backdrop or a resource to be managed, rather than a vibrant, sensing participant in our lives. Drawing on anthropology, literary studies, ecology, history, and sound studies, The Botany of Sound asks us to hear ecological worlds as spaces of perception, meaning, and memory. By listening to living landscapes and the memories held in vegetal bodies–across literary forests, archival traces, and sonic testimonies–we reconsider the natural world as a meeting point of human and more-than-human life. Our inquiry this quarter begins with three questions: How do witnessing, agency, and governance change when we understand them through a vegetal, aural lens? How might sound and vegetal life help produce knowledge? How can botany itself be transformed through vegetal resonance?
Spring: Indigenous Ecological Knowledges
In its final quarter, the EHP turns to Indigenous ecological knowledges as they are expressed, transmitted, and contested in South Asian music, art, literature, and folklore. Reading these forms alongside the region's hydro- and land-based politics and ontologies, we ask how aesthetic and narrative traditions carry ecological knowledge–and how they reframe conservation, climate action, and storytelling as sites of meaning rather than mere response. In conversation with artists, activists, scholars, and community organizers, we treat their work not only as intervention but as a body of thought worth interpreting in its own terms. Our inquiry this quarter begins with three questions: How do music, art, and literature carry and transform ecological knowledge across generations and communities? How do we navigate the confluences between different spheres of knowledge production when we engage the more-than-human, especially amid climate change? What is the role of public intellectuals in interconnected worlds?
Fall Quarter Meeting Schedule
- Environmental Humanities Project and Graduate Certificate Launch & Mixer
- Thursday, October 1, 5-7 pm
- Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall
- Graduate Methodology Workshop in Environmental Humanities: Hydrofeminisms
- Thursday, October 15, 5-7 pm
- Location TBD
- Public Lecture in Hydrofeminisms: Learning Endings
- Thursday, October 29, time TBD
- Location TBD
- Graduate Student Work-in-progress Lab
- Thursday, November 12, 12 - 1:30 pm
- Location TBD
Learn about our Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities
environmentalhumanities [at] stanford.edu (Contact Us)
