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]

This article discusses rabbinic qualifications to the Biblical prohibition of verbally saying the names of foreign gods (typically represented by idols).

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]

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 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]

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]

This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non-human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconcept…[Read more]

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

This essay begins by offering some observations about how holiness was comprehended and expressed in Victorian and Edwardian England. In addition to the ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’ that characterised society, notions of holiness were shaped by, and developed in reaction to, dominant philosophical movements; notably, the Enlightenment and Romanti…[Read more]