PPEH Launches New Environmental Humanities Minor & Calls for Course Proposals

December 18, 2019

Undergraduate Minor in Environmental Humanities

We are pleased to announce a brand new Environmental Humanities Minor in the School of Arts and Sciences, which will officially begin accepting students in the fall of 2020! This new minor will give Penn undergraduates the opportunity to work across disciplines and explore how knowledge systems represent and respond to past and present environments, ecologies, places and worlds at a variety of scales. The minor emphasizes change and transformation, rather than stable states and received disciplinary borders. The EH minor emphasizes arts-driven inquiry into place and world-making and, with a public engagement requirement, also insists on the importance of various methods of public research and outcomes--from field work to community-based participatory research, to art and science exhibits to evidence-driven advocacy. Additional details are available HERE.

students smiling in a van with text on the side reading: 6 or 7 CUs 2 humanities courses (elect from list) 1 social science course (elect from list) 1 nat science course (elect from list) 1 team-taught transdisciplinary “Touchstone” course 1 Capstone, an EH Collaboratory for public research Certification of participation in community-based research / public engagement

Many thanks go to our EH curricular task force (Meg Arenberg, Daniel Barber, David Barnes, Etienne Benson, Joseph Kable, Kristina Lyons, Marcy Nortion, Alain Plante, Paul Saint-Amour, Marc Schmidt, and Bethany Wiggin) for their hard work developing this curriculum.

Call for Course Proposals

In order to augment the robust course offerings in our new environmental humanities minor, PPEH is also calling on faculty and teaching staff at Penn to submit course proposals in two categories: team-taught courses in Transdiscplinary Environmental Humanities, and courses or course components in public research and/or community engagement. Selected proposals will be awarded funds toward development of new courses for Spring 2021 and beyond. Proposals are due by close of business January 31, 2020 with selections made by March 1, 2020. Additional details available HERE.