ITAL 37.09 Italian Ecologies: Italy and the Environmental Humanities
What can Italy teach us about our relationships with the nonhuman world in the current socio-environmental crisis?
In this course, we will focus on how Italian writers and activists, visual artists and philosophers engaged with real and fictional environments, and how their engagements reflect, critique, and animate the approach that Italian culture has had toward the physical environment and its ecology since late antiquity. Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, we will explore topics including climate change, environmental justice, animal ethics, and the potential relationships between socio-environmental degradation and epidemics. We will thus analyze how Italian ecological narratives fit within the current transnational debate occurring in the Environmental Humanities.
Our goal is to provide both an account of how Italian culture has shaped contemporary environmental thought and how Italian authors are presently developing unique ecological approaches to raise questions about the role of humans in a possible post-natural world.
This class is taught in English but with x-hours in Italian for majors/minors.
Instructor
Benvegnu