Welcome letter from Dr. Danielle Endres, Director

Welcome to the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Program! Our interdisciplinary master’s program, housed in the College of Humanities, offers an innovative, research intensive, and community engaged education that prepares students to become future leaders in environmental thought and action. Our Program, founded in 2005, seeks to offer a unique educational experience for students based on these intersecting tenets:

seeking just solutions to complex environmental and social problems
considering the role of sense of place in environmental thought and action
bridging humanities, scientific, and artistic knowledges
thinking critically about a variety of environmental theories, practices, and traditions
learning from a vibrantly diverse range of voices, perspectives, experiences, and knowledges
fostering scholarly work that contributes to both knowledge production and the betterment of our communities
highlighting the role of humanities theory and method—including philosophy, history, rhetoric, languages, literature, creative writing, cultural studies, and area studies—in addressing understanding human relations with nature
engaging in respectful and responsible partnerships with community partners.

In addition to coursework, students produce research and creative projects based on their scholarly interests with the support of faculty, staff, and, in some cases, community partners. Students in the past several years have pursued projects on climate justice, lithium mining, Indigenous-led programing at state parks, ecological restoration, nuclearism in the West, Indigenous and Pasifika resurgence movements, tabletop role playing games, environmental collaboration, ecocritical analysis of literature, essays on the Great Salt Lake, and more. Our excellent alumni have gone on to pursue doctoral degrees in top national and international programs, work as environmental educators, and serve a variety of communities through non-profit and public service work.

The Environmental Humanities Program is supported in part by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation that supports building our curriculum in three core areas: environmental justice, amplifying Indigenous knowledges, and community-engaged research and learning. While not all students and faculty produce scholarship in all or some of these areas, the Program sees them as key elements of an education in the environmental humanities. Students in the Program will engage with these three areas through some of our coursework and some students choose to pursue scholarship that centers and delves deeper into one or more of these areas. This enables the Program to build and sustain pathways for students to become environmental leaders, to learn from and respect the lived experiences of those most impacted by environmental degradation, and to work closely with grassroots community organizations focused on a range of issues including environmental injustices, disability access, air quality, equitable access to the natural world, energy transition, and more. A dedicated community engagement coordinator connects our students with community partners relevant to their research and engagement goals. Each semester, a funded practitioner-in-residence further supports students by sharing their expertise in community work, environmental leadership, and collaborative problem-solving toward just environmental futures.

As an interdisciplinary degree, students in the Environmental Humanities Program take advantage of the many resources for environmental and sustainability work at the University of Utah. The University of Utah hosts a world-class faculty doing research on a wide range of environmental and sustainability topics across the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Faculty affiliated with the Environmental Humanities Program use a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives in their research and teaching about climate justice, energy democracy, Native histories and futures, political economies of environmental change, speculative fiction, environmental histories, unhoused peoples’ relations with the natural world, plants and animal rhetoric, science communication, Indigenous decolonization, environmental anti-racism, and more. The Program also partners with campus partners including the Sustainability Office, Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy, American West Center, Natural History Museum of Utah, Center for Native Excellence and Tribal Engagement, University of Utah Press, Tanner Humanities Center and the SPARC Environmental Justice Lab.

The University of Utah is located in the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Utah Tribes and is a crossroad for Indigenous peoples. The Program is housed in an historic building that provides community space, meeting rooms, student offices, and proximity to open space.

I invite you to look around our website and see the great things our students, faculty, and alumni are accomplishing. I would be glad to hear from you.

Danielle Endres, Director

Professor, Dept of Communication

danielle.endres @ utah.edu