Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Hosted by Dolly Jørgensen & Finn Arne Jørgensen
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Education
  • Updated Weekly

The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.

  1. Sep 28

    Hannah Klaubert - Narrating Nuclear Disaster

    Literature scholar Hannah Klaubert discussed her book Narrating Nuclear Disaster: Literary Form after Chornobyl and Fukushima (Bloomsbury, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with host Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 28 September 2026. In a field that remains scientifically contested and, in the current moment of climate breakdown, highly politicized, Narrating Nuclear Disasters offers literature as an arena for exploring the uncertainty arising from events whose short- and long-term effects remain hard to oversee. By reading a wide corpus of post-Chornobyl and post-Fukushima literature from canonical texts by Christa Wolf, Julian Barnes and Ruth Ozeki to genre fiction such as thrillers and travelogues, the book offers a new way of thinking about nuclear narratives and nuclear culture more broadly. In doing so, it positions nuclear disaster narratives within a wider context of “Anthropocene literature”, forging new connections between nuclear culture and contemporary ecocriticism.

  2. Sep 14

    Miriam Tola - Resurgent Commons

    Miriam Tola, Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at John Cabot University (Italy), discussed her book Resurgent Commons: Feminist Political Ecologies in the European South (Fordham University Press, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with hosts Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 14 September 2026. Once dismissed as “tragedy,” the commons have been making a comeback. Amid intensifying social and environmental injustices in neoliberal regimes, scholars and activists have turned to the commons—historically, the shared ownership of land—as a way to express more just ways of living within and against the grasp of capitalism. Resurgent Commons reframes the commons by foregrounding relations of care and socio-ecological reproduction, while questioning anthropocentric formulations that would render the commons a set of available resources and the product of human cooperation. Interdisciplinary in nature, Tola’s book troubles universalist accounts of the commons by unearthing its ambivalent role in European colonial histories marked by racial and sexual violence and environmental destruction. As central case studies, the book considers contemporary political projects that enact feminist, anti-racist and more-than-human practices of urban commoning in Rome, a sprawling built environment in the European South that is also a city of ruins. From transfeminist commons to struggles for repairing areas where industrial ruins and recalcitrant natures coexist, to encounters with indigenous perspectives from the Americas, resurgent commons enact forms of life that are at odds with dominant regimes of property and governance. The book shows how a reconsideration of a supposedly obsolete mode of shared ownership can enable new modes of inhabiting the earth.

  3. Sep 7

    Christos Lynteris - How Plague Got Rats

    Christos Lynteris, Professor of medical anthropology at the University of St Andrews (UK), discussed his book How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with hosts Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 7 September 2026. Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats, Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century. This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning. This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease.

  4. Aug 31

    From Footprints to Transforming the Night - 200th episode special

    Hosts Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen held a special event "From Footprints to Transforming the Night" to mark the 200th episode of the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 31 August 2026. Previous book talk guests Rocío Gomez and Ellen Arnold and regular audience member Gerry Fitzgerald were invited to comment on the state of environmental humanities books during our conversation. Reflecting on our amazing series, from our very first book talk on Footprints to our most recent talk on Transforming Night, we highlighted the valuable scholarship of the past and set the stage for the future environmental humanities book talks.

  5. Aug 24

    Sara Pritchard - Transforming Night

    Sara Pritchard, Professor of science and technology studies at Cornell University (USA), discussed her book Transforming Night: The History and Science of Light Pollution (University of Washington Press, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with hosts Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 24 August 2026. Darkness has become legible—and contested. Blending archival narrative with on-the-ground ethnography, Sara B. Pritchard traces how four fields—astronomy, remote sensing, conservation science, and ecology—have investigated artificial light at night, turning a ubiquitous convenience into a category of harm. From observatories chasing ever-receding darkness to the satellite images that first rendered a nocturnal planet from space and recent “Black Marble” maps, Pritchard shows how methods, instruments, and field sites shape what scientists can know about night and light—and what remains unseen. Across these encounters, night emerges not as a backdrop but as an environment in its own right—one transformed by rapidly expanding, brightening illumination in the Anthropocene. Transforming Night chronicles the ascent of “light pollution,” as well as the new challenge of space-based brightness from satellite constellations, even as dark-sky advocates fight to preserve the starry firmament. Attentive to politics as much as photons, Pritchard brings environmental justice to the fore—highlighting tensions among light poverty, forced illumination, and surveillance and calls for “beneficial darkness.” She takes seriously Indigenous astronomers’ critiques of dispossession and “astro-colonialism,” asking what it means to site world-class telescopes on sacred land. Sweeping from local parks to planetary vistas, Transforming Night reframes a familiar story of modern light as a history of changing nights—past, present, and possible. It will engage readers in environmental history and humanities, science and technology studies, and the sciences themselves, along with dark-sky activists and anyone drawn to the beauty and politics of the world after nightfall.

  6. May 11

    Bob McKay – Anthropofugal Fictions

    Robert (Bob) McKay, Professor of Contemporary Literature at University of Sheffield (UK), discussed his book Anthropofugal Fictions: Literature, Species Politics and Flight from Humanity (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 11 May 2026. This book traces a radical politics of species across the work of four significant Anglophone authors of the late twentieth century: Brigid Brophy, Alice Walker, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace. Presenting an exciting and original perspective, Robert McKay argues that these literary figures tell anthropofugal stories, in which a tendency towards animals coincides with a desire to flee from humanity. Their writing disavows allegiance to humanity’s various guises and ideals, dismissing human distinctiveness and disturbing human privilege to reimagine life with so-called animals. While deeply grounded in the practice of literary close reading, Anthropofugal Fictions is also a work of philosophy and theory that shows how doubts about species identity lie at the heart of live debates about gender, sexuality, race and ethics. It is a challenging and provocative account of what it means not to be human, and of living amongst animals without species difference as a legitimation of one’s actions.

    Bob McKay – Anthropofugal Fictions

  7. May 4

    Mary Mendoza – Deadly Divide

    Mary Mendoza, assistant professor of history at Penn State University (USA), discussed her book Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) in the Greeenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 4 May 2026. When most people picture the US-Mexico border, they think of walls, fences, concrete, and wire. But in this first history of how the environment influenced physical boundary-making between the two nations, Mary E. Mendoza focuses on how the natural world shaped ideas about race, gender, and security. In so doing, she unearths surprising origins of the modern-day immigration debate. Mexican migrants have historically been seen by some in the US as invasive and less than human. But actual invasive pests are part of this story. Deadly Divide shows how cattle ticks, the body louse, foot-and-mouth disease, and the female Mexican fruit fly contributed to the to the ever-increasing racialization of Mexican migrants, which in turn led to increased policing, criminalization, and fears about immigrants infiltrating the US. As Mendoza follows the stories of migrants in relation to various species, Indigenous peoples, and officials on both sides of the border, she argues that the need for mobility overpowered both governments’ laws, fences, and agents. At the same time, the border’s symbolic power became a source of terror not only for migrants who try to cross into the US but for those who feel they cannot cross back, making the US a nation that suspends immigrants between two worlds.

    Mary Mendoza – Deadly Divide

  8. Apr 27

    John Scanlan – The Idea of Waste

    John Scanlan, Research Fellow in Place Development & Promotion at University of Lancashire (UK), discussed his book The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life (Reaktion Books, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 27 April 2026. The Idea of Waste starts with the premise that waste is inevitable in human society. It explores how we have grappled with both the material reality and the spectre of this shape-shifting phenomenon throughout history – utilizing it, dreaming of overcoming it, yet never escaping it. John Scanlan investigates what waste is and why it seems to be intrinsic to human life, at every turn, in every age and epoch. He demonstrates how waste never disappears completely but rather only proliferates anew. The compelling narrative shows waste to be both an enduring material consequence of human activity and an idea or state of being.

    John Scanlan – The Idea of Waste
See All (203)

About

The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.

Information