With generous support from the Mellon Foundation's Higher Learning Initiative
The Environmental Humanities initiative at Reed College fosters innovative curriculum, vital scholarship, and collaborative approaches to ecological crisis and the cultural imagination. Expanding Reed’s curricular offerings in an array of humanistic disciplines, Environmental Humanities (EH) connects diverse fields of study to urgent, complex questions of social and environmental justice in the classroom and beyond. New EH courses leverage the power of humanistic inquiry to reveal truths and promote change by examining environmental and social justice as inextricably linked threads: interdependent and mutually constitutive in crisis, but also in transformation. Fostering a more capacious understanding of social justice through the environmental imagination broadens our understanding of political activism to examine narratives centered not only on civil rights but also on what is right for those who share a place.
With 20 faculty in 12 different disciplines, this initiative, generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, has generated a wide range of departmental classes distinctive in their methods and fields, but engaging with shared frameworks and themes, and piloted new mechanisms for collaborative teaching and learning. To learn more about courses developed through this initiative, please visit the Faculty and Courses page. You can also find tagged EH courses in over a dozen departments by searching the course catalogue by "Course Theme," selecting "Environmental Humanities" from the menu. Our new interdisciplinary half-unit course, ENVH 101: Introduction to Environmental Humanities, is currently underway, team-taught by EH faculty across the college. These courses will count towards Reed’s new Environmental Humanities Minor, beginning in Fall 2026.
Learn about our collaborations with the Sustainability and Environmental Justice (SEJ) Collective.