Roadkill is disgusting. Many people just want it removed from the roads as quickly as possible, and they don’t care where it goes. In Pennsylvania, most of the deer carcasses that are collected from the roads end up in landfills. But is this a respectful way to treat the dead? And what about the vultures and other scavengers who would otherwise e…[Read more]

Review of the book “The Vesuvian Eruption of 1631: an Early Modern History” (by Alfonso Tortora)

By the end of the sixteenth century, many Jesuit colleges had become centers of excellence all over Europe for such disciplines as mathematics, astronomy, hydraulics, and mechanics. Not a few members of the order provided influential contributions to science: in the case of the study of waters, the inquisitive eye of Jesuits took part in the l…[Read more]

Since its first attempts to understand natural phenomena, early modern science devoted great attention to the problematic issue of the origin of springs. This essay examines the lively debate that emerged from the studies on fresh water during the years spanning from the mid-sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. By focusing on the…[Read more]

In 1687, after he graduated in Medicine, young Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730) returned in the Duchy of Modena and Reggio. In those years he mainly served as general practitioner; nevertheless, he also devoted many studies to various aspects of the natural sciences. He performed many observations, accurately reporting them in seven “Quaderni”…[Read more]

In this article, I argue that the groundlessness associated with postmodernism is not as entrenched within its discourse as it may appear. Graham Swift’s Waterland (1992) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), while conforming to many of the aesthetic values of postmodernism, share an ecopostmodernist platform that raises questions and con…[Read more]

Readers are often left baffled by the bizarre retribution Marie de France’s werewolf protagonist inflicts upon his treacherous wife: why bite off her nose, specifically? Though critics have offered a range of interpretations for the wife’s punishment in Marie’s lai, approaching the significance of noselessness from a dog’s perspective may deepe…[Read more]

An introductory survey of climate fiction (a.k.a. “cli-fi”) in English. Written with an international readership in mind.

In response to perceived valuation problems giving rise to global environmental crisis, ‘nature’ is being qualified, quantified and materialised as the new external(ised) ‘Nature-whole’ of ‘natural capital’. This paper problematises the increasing legibility, through numbering and (ac)counting practices, of natural capital as an apparently…[Read more]

This engagement highlights the antagonism between wealth and the commodity value form posed at the heart of Marx’s work. In doing so, it considers methodological possibilities for both understanding and intervening in the fabricating of new alienated capitalist values from beyond-human natures.

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. Uniting a diverse set of emerging and established scholars, Animal Languages questions the assumed medieval distinction between humans and other animals. The…[Read more]

The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between c…[Read more]

The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between c…[Read more]

Appeals to a cosmic ecological democracy are common in environmentally engaged scholarship, and especially in ecological theology. This essay takes up the thought of Sylvia Wynter, Delores Williams, and Saidiya Hartman to argue for a different horizon for ecological politics.

In this class, students will engage in a critical examination of environmental transformations that arise from the complex interactions between natural systems and human activities. The pursuit of knowledge about natural resources and ecological systems is a scientific enterprise, yet addressing questions about the production, consumption,…[Read more]

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look. Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truth…[Read more]

The debate over whether the creation of the New Model Army represented continuity or change in the supply systems of parliamentarian armies has suffered from a lack of detailed research on the Earl of Essex’s army. This article begins to redress the balance by examining the supply of horses and saddles to the armies of Essex, Manchester, Waller, a…[Read more]

Speculation about how the social history of early-modern England could be made more sophisticated by including animals.

Traces the history of municipal solid-waste disposal at Bakersfield California from 1872-1992

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]