Ecocriticism as a theoretical model has primarily been used in the study of Romantic, post-Romantic, and contemporary literary texts. Applications of the concepts to medieval literature, however, are a fairly recent phenomenon. This book examines key, canonical works from medieval Spain, showing how descriptions of the natural world in these texts are informed by both the authors’ perceptions of the environment and established literary models.

Poetry. California Interest. Environmental Studies. In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bodies and bodies that want to be poems. This desire is never fulfilled, and the gap between language and world worries and shapes each poem. FOSSILS IN THE MAKING presents poems as feedback loops, wagers, and proofs that register and reflect upon the nature of ecological crisis. They are always in the making and never made. Together these poems echo word and world, becoming and being. This book ushers forward a powerful and engaged new voice dedicated to unraveling the logic of poetry as an act of making in a world that is being unmade.

Annotation. Inscribed Landscapes explores the role of inscription in the social construction of place, power, and identity. Bringing together twenty-one scholars across a range of fields-primarily archaeology, anthropology, and geography-it examines how social codes and hegemonic practices have resulted in the production of particular senses of place, exploring the physical and metaphysical marking of place as a means of accessing social history.

Humanities for the Environment, or HfE, is an ambitious project that from 2013-2015 was funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project networked universities and researchers internationally through a system of 'observatories'. This book collects the work of contributors networked through the North American, Asia-Pacific, and Australia-Pacific observatories. Humanities for the Environment showcases how humanists are working to 'integrate knowledges' from diverse cultures and ontologies and pilot new 'constellations of practice' that are moving beyond traditional contemplative or reflective outcomes (the book, the essay) towards solutions to the greatest social and environmental challenges of our time. With the still controversial concept of the 'Anthropocene' as a starting point for a widening conversation, contributors range across geographies, ecosystems, climates and weather regimes; moving from icy, melting Arctic landscapes to the bleaching Australian Great Barrier Reef, and from an urban pedagogical 'laboratory' in Phoenix, Arizona to Vatican City in Rome. Chapters explore the ways in which humanists, in collaboration with communities and disciplines across academia, are responding to warming oceans, disappearing islands, collapsing fisheries, evaporating reservoirs of water, exploding bushfires, and spreading radioactive contamination. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences interested in interdisciplinary questions of environment and culture.

Drawing upon scholarship of cultural identity, anthropology and historical linguistics, this book offers a novel and contextual approach to the interpretation of archaeological evidence for Jewish populations in North Africa and elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean.

Climate change is an enormous and increasingly urgent issue. This important book highlights how humanities disciplines can mobilize the creative and critical power of students, teachers, and communities to confront climate change. The book is divided into four clear sections to help readers integrate climate change into the classes and topics they are already teaching as well as engage with interdisciplinary methods and techniques. Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities constitutes a map and toolkit for anyone who wishes to draw upon the strengths of literary and cultural studies to teach valuable lessons that engage with climate change.

Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance applies literary ecocriticism to the imaginative fiction of the Greek world from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Through analyses of hunting, gardening, bride-stealing, and warfare, Byzantine Ecocriticism exposes the attitudes and behaviors that justified human control over women, nature, and animals; the means by which such control was exerted; and the anxieties surrounding its limits. Adam Goldwyn thus demonstrates the ways in which intersectional ecocriticism, feminism, and posthumanism can be applied to medieval texts, and illustrates how the legacies of medieval and Byzantine environmental practice and ideology continue to be relevant to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.