This event is co-sponsored by the Kinney Center and School of Earth and Sustainability.

Professor Annette Kehnel studied History and Biology at the University of Freiburg, Somerville College, Oxford, and LMU in Munich. She received her doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin for her research on Irish convent communities and taught at the TU Dresden, where she received her post-doctorate in 2004. Since 2005 she has held a chair in Medieval History at the University of Mannheim. She has published numerous works on her main topics of research: cultural and economic history and historical anthropology.

In The Green Ages, Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon. Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably—we’ve done it before!
 
From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspiring examples and concepts ripe for rediscovery, and we urgently need them as today’s challenges—finite resources, the twilight of consumerism, and growing inequality—threaten what we have come to think of as a modern way of living sustainably. This is a stimulating and revelatory look at a past that has the power to change our future.

Get 20% off your purchase by entering "GREENAGES" at checkout.

Alisha Rankin is a Professor of History at Tufts University. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. Her research interests include early modern European history (c. 1450-1700), the history of science and medicine, the history of pharmacy, and women's history. Her first book, Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines German princesses who became widely known and admired for their medical knowledge in the sixteenth century – and particularly for making medicinal cures. She has also co-edited a collection of essays titled Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500-1800 (Ashgate Press in 2011). Her latest book, The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (University of Chicago Press, 2021), looks at the important role poison antidotes played in attempts to evaluate early modern cures – and in the development of early modern experiment more broadly. 

A Five College Renaissance Seminar

Prof. Brian Yellen (Dept. of Earth Geographic and Climate Sciences) journeys back in time through the Amethyst Brook Conservation Area to reveal the dynamism of watersheds and how waterways ‘downstream’ shape the landscapes and ecosystems where we live. Joined by poets, fiction writers, geologists, geographers, visual artists, and musicians, this workshop explores the long-histories of human and non-human engagements with water and its transforming power in the arts, industry, natural world, and cultural imaginations.

Please join us for the opening reception of Artist in Residence Susan Montgomery's exhibit of original work, 'Fatal Flora: Poisonous Revenge Narratives'.

Navigating the line between medicine and poison has always been tricky. Historically, women have transformed household botanicals into vital remedies and fatal toxics to shape the fate of their own lives. Fatal Flora: Poisonous Revenge Narratives asks how, in the hands of knowledgeable women, the natural world can be transformed from medicinal to murderous in a pinch, dash, or splash of ingredients. Artist in Residence, Susan Montgomery, blends history, memory, and the imagination on her canvases to recall real and mythical women who change their lives by harnessing the powers of the natural world.

Susan Montgomery teaches drawing in the Smith College Department of Art. She is a recipient of the Blanch E. Coleman Award, Mellon Foundation and a Sustainable Artist Foundation Grant. She has exhibited at venues including the Fuller Art and Craft Museum, Lyman Museum of Springfield History at the Springfield Quadrangle Museums, Five College Women’s Resource Center at Mount Holyoke College, Historic Northampton Museum, A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery and the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College.

An Elements talk

This talk from Marie Comuzzo (Brandeis University) centers on the transformational process that musicoscientists Roger and Katy Payne initiated when they heard humpback whales' vocalizations as song, and the rippling effect that their 1970 album Sounds of the Humpback Whales had on the environmental efforts to end whaling. Through an exploration of this album and the works of George Crumb, Emily Doolittle, Alan Hovhannes, and John Travener – composers who deeply listened to whales in real and imaginative ways – this talk reflects on how hearing, listening, and composing alongside whales, led to a dramatic transformation in the perception of the ocean, from an aphonic space to a rich, dynamic, and musical sonic environment. 

Faculty chamber music concert curated by Ayano Kataoka and Steven Beck, inspired by the exhibition "Breach: Logbook 24 | Staccato" by Courtney M. Leonard at the University Museum of Contemporary Art.

Featuring Ayano Kataoka, percussion/marimba; Steven Beck, piano; Cobus du Toit, flute; Edward Arron, cello

Music by George Crumb: Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), Toru Takemitsu: Towards the Sea, Russell Wharton: Phylogenesis, Angelica Negron: Espacios, objetos, sonidos y tiempo and Luigi Nono: ...sofferte onde serene...

An Elements concert

Department of Music & Dance Listening Room

The Department of Music & Dance's Listening Room is a series organized by Jonathan Hulting-Cohen and Lindsay Pope. This event is hosted by Evan MacCarthy and will feature songs and instrumental works capturing images and echoes of seas, rivers, ice, and aquatic myths. In addition to a small selection of recorded excerpts, live musical performances will include Toru Takemitsu's Toward the Sea, Claude Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau" from Images, series I, Claude Debussy's "Le tombeau des Naïades" from Chansons de Bilitis, and Franz Schubert's "Wohin?" from Die schöne Mullerin (D. 795). With performers Cobus du Toit, flute; William Hite, voice; Ayano Kataoka, marimba; Julia Ma, piano; Lindsay Pope, voice; Jingjing Wan, piano.

Please join us for the opening reception of Artist in Residence Brandon Graving's exhibit of original work, 'Elusive Prize: Wonder, Wing, & Transmutation'

Brandon Graving is a sculptor and printmaker and who often works on a very large scale, in mediums that include bronze, neon, paper, resins, steel and wood. She is also the owner and master printmaker at Gravity Press Experimental Print Shop which holds one of the largest platen presses in the world. Her work has been exhibited widely in museums, public, and private collections.

Visit here to learn more about her work.

Title: Y3K: Awakening 

4:30– Waking Up: A Jazz Performance by Eric Hofbauer / The Five Agents, based on the young climate activist Greta Thunberg delivered a speech at the UN Summit for Climate Action, in which she declared, “How dare you!” This will be accompanied by a dance performance by UMass Amherst Jazz Dance class taught by Lauren Cox. 

5:30– Ripple Effects: Reflections on Water in Story and Sound. Part of the multi-year arts and humanities project  Elements with Evan MacCarthy and Marjorie Rubright from The Renaissance of the Earth 

6:00– Landscape of Fear. Saxophonists Jonathan Hulting-Cohen and Pantelis Lykoudis perform Marcos Balter’s evocative and provocative work for two high instruments. 

6:30– Ghost Ensemble,   (contact: Ben Richter). Performing Miya Masaoka's Plant Life Recounted Here and Pauline Oliveros's In Consideration of the Earth. 

Acknowledgements: 

SES, RoE, Music and Dance, Architecture 

An Environmental Humanities talk by renowned interdisciplinary scholar Anne McClintock, whose scholarship explores the intersections of militarization, war and the Anthropocene, and engages deeply with questions of race, gender, sexualities, colonialism, and globalization.

An art talk by artist Siobhán MacDonald, whose award-winning works respond to the climate crisis by capturing tipping points and robustly engaging with climate science.

Please join Evan MacCarthy (Music and Dance), Marjorie Rubright (English), and Steve Mentz (English) for a multimodal workshop on sonic and poetic icescapes of the Arctic. A part of The Great Melt: The Arctic Frontier of the Anthropocene, this workshop centers the role of the humanities in shaping Arctic imaginaries. Moving across sonic, linguistic, and poetic engagements, we will open onto conversations that delve into the blue humanities. 

The dialogue-centered workshop will feature guided listening of musical works by John Luther Adams, Tanya Tagaq, and Lei Liang, and an exploration of the place of language in imagining human relations with ice, together with a close reading of the Inupiat poet Joan Naviyuk Kane’s recent collection of lyrical poems Dark Traffic (2021). 

Invited guest, Professor Steve Mentz (St. John's University), early modern scholar and pioneer of the blue humanities, will show how we are moving “Toward a Poetics of Solid Water.” 

This event is presented in association with Elements, Renaissance of the Earth, & Anthropocene Lab

This is the inaugural event of Elements, the multi-year arts and humanities project exploring the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water through a variety of cultural lenses across disciplines and across time. Evan MacCarthy will offer a guided listening session of excerpts of works of music and sonic art of the last four centuries, which evoke the creative, destructive, and restorative forces of water. The program will highlight instruments fashioned from water or ice, the expressive, recorded sounds of flowing, dripping, and melting, as well as songs and instrumental works capturing images and echoes of seas, rivers, floods, glaciers, and storms. We will investigate how composers, musicians, and sound artists have found musical meaning in the watery depths, rising tides, and quickly changing states and qualities of water.

Elements is a multi-year arts and humanities project, which explores the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water through a variety of cultural lenses across disciplines and across time. We seek to bring together scholars and practitioners as we trace the roles played by these material elements and their constant state of flux in shaping conceptions of the cosmos, framing notions of origin, myth, religion, balance, and natural philosophy, and capturing the poetic powers of the natural world. 

For calendar year 2024 (spring and fall terms), events will be oriented around water and its pre-modern, contemporary, and future imaginings. The changing, moving states and qualities of water — melting, freezing, drying, evaporating, flowing, soaking, dripping, rising, flooding, poisoning, disappearing, cleansing, nourishing, preserving — are central to our programming. From rivers, lakes, and oceans, to fog, snow, and glaciers, we will explore human and non-human contexts of myth, cosmology, creation, disaster, extraction, consumption, pollution, scarcity, health, hygiene, and renewal. Events include performances, readings, viewings/listening sessions, and conversations.

Director, Evan MacCarthy, Professor of Music and Dance, UMass Amherst

NANCY B. GRIMM is an ecosystem ecologist who studies the interactions of climate change, human activities, resilience, and biogeochemical processes in urban and stream ecosystems. Grimm was founding director of the Central Arizona–Phoenix LTER, co-directed the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, and now co-directs the NATURA and ESSA networks, all focused on solving problems of the Anthropocene, especially in cities. With collaborators and students, her research centers on nature-based, technological, and governance solutions that can build resilience to a future with increased frequency and magnitude of extreme events. In streams, Grimm studies how hydrologic and climatic variability influence ecosystem processes such as stream metabolism and nutrient dynamics, and more recently, the impacts of a novel desert disturbance (wildfire) on stream processes through hydrologic connectivity of upland to stream-riparian corridor. Grimm was President of the Ecological Society of America and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Freshwater Science. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has made >230 contributions to the scientific literature with colleagues and students.

The Futuring Lab seeks to question, discover, and remake chrono-logical representations of time. In response to pervading anxieties about the near future–  concerns about climate destabilization, rising social inequity, racism, political division, and ecological collapse, among other things– this timely exhibition employs the practice of futuring to generate new building blocks for imagining futures that are not only possible and probable but also preferable. Futuring is a pluralistic practice; there is not one future, but many; it is interdisciplinary, democratic, and inclusive of many voices. Futuring is not an escape from the present, rather it is an awareness of our becoming at this moment, which can help increase our insight and response-ability to the long and thick now.  

For this exhibition, the Design Building Gallery will feature a large interactive wall installation where visitors can post personal and political events, historic and speculative, known and unknown. This interactive Khronika pushes against the sequential and linear flow of past-present-future to envision a nonlinear entanglement of human and more-than-human events spanning the current millennium and beyond. In this effort to un-map the dominant capitalist and colonial narratives of time, the Khronika makes visible a cascade of mattering whereby the past is yet-to-come and futures re-member the forgotten. The practice of futuring extends beyond end-of-world narratives and asks us to consider both old and new economies, ecologies, and cultures of collective emancipation. 

3:30 The Renaissance of the Earth with Suzette Martin’s “Tipping Points”

4:00 Carbon Cycle 101 with Rob DeConto and Julie Brigham-Grette 

4:30 Carbon Culture & Environmental Humanities with Malcolm Sen

The Futuring Lab seeks to question, discover, and remake chrono-logical representations of time. In response to pervading anxieties about the near future–  concerns about climate destabilization, rising social inequity, racism, political division, and ecological collapse, among other things– this timely exhibition employs the practice of futuring to generate new building blocks for imagining futures that are not only possible and probable but also preferable. Futuring is a pluralistic practice; there is not one future, but many; it is interdisciplinary, democratic, and inclusive of many voices. Futuring is not an escape from the present, rather it is an awareness of our becoming at this moment, which can help increase our insight and response-ability to the long and thick now.  

For this exhibition, the Design Building Gallery will feature a large interactive wall installation where visitors can post personal and political events, historic and speculative, known and unknown. This interactive Khronika pushes against the sequential and linear flow of past-present-future to envision a nonlinear entanglement of human and more-than-human events spanning the current millennium and beyond. In this effort to un-map the dominant capitalist and colonial narratives of time, the Khronika makes visible a cascade of mattering whereby the past is yet-to-come and futures re-member the forgotten. The practice of futuring extends beyond end-of-world narratives and asks us to consider both old and new economies, ecologies, and cultures of collective emancipation. 

3:00 Ensemble Building & Applied Theater with Rebecca Brown Adelman 

4:00 Metaphysical Carwash fortunes & poetry with Edie Meidav & Friends

6:00 Future Slam: open mic poetry & prose, with MC Montanna Harling

The Futuring Lab seeks to question, discover, and remake chrono-logical representations of time. In response to pervading anxieties about the near future–  concerns about climate destabilization, rising social inequity, racism, political division, and ecological collapse, among other things– this timely exhibition employs the practice of futuring to generate new building blocks for imagining futures that are not only possible and probable but also preferable. Futuring is a pluralistic practice; there is not one future, but many; it is interdisciplinary, democratic, and inclusive of many voices. Futuring is not an escape from the present, rather it is an awareness of our becoming at this moment, which can help increase our insight and response-ability to the long and thick now.  

For this exhibition, the Design Building Gallery will feature a large interactive wall installation where visitors can post personal and political events, historic and speculative, known and unknown. This interactive Khronika pushes against the sequential and linear flow of past-present-future to envision a nonlinear entanglement of human and more-than-human events spanning the current millennium and beyond. In this effort to un-map the dominant capitalist and colonial narratives of time, the Khronika makes visible a cascade of mattering whereby the past is yet-to-come and futures re-member the forgotten. The practice of futuring extends beyond end-of-world narratives and asks us to consider both old and new economies, ecologies, and cultures of collective emancipation. 

2:00 Deep Listening Workshop with Ben Richter

3:00 Indigenous Time with Andre Strongbearheart

4:00 Crip Time, Crip Space, Crip Scene with Jeff Kasper 

5:00 Afro-Retro Futurism: a storytelling workshop with Oluwatoyin T. Okele and Richie Wills

The Futuring Lab seeks to question, discover, and remake chrono-logical representations of time. In response to pervading anxieties about the near future–  concerns about climate destabilization, rising social inequity, racism, political division, and ecological collapse, among other things– this timely exhibition employs the practice of futuring to generate new building blocks for imagining futures that are not only possible and probable but also preferable. Futuring is a pluralistic practice; there is not one future, but many; it is interdisciplinary, democratic, and inclusive of many voices. Futuring is not an escape from the present, rather it is an awareness of our becoming at this moment, which can help increase our insight and response-ability to the long and thick now.  

For this exhibition, the Design Building Gallery will feature a large interactive wall installation where visitors can post personal and political events, historic and speculative, known and unknown. This interactive Khronika pushes against the sequential and linear flow of past-present-future to envision a nonlinear entanglement of human and more-than-human events spanning the current millennium and beyond. In this effort to un-map the dominant capitalist and colonial narratives of time, the Khronika makes visible a cascade of mattering whereby the past is yet-to-come and futures re-member the forgotten. The practice of futuring extends beyond end-of-world narratives and asks us to consider both old and new economies, ecologies, and cultures of collective emancipation. 

12:00 Lunch with pizza-- all are welcome

12:30 Beauty, Grief, Action: a conversation in the round with Trebbe Johnson 

3:00  Embodying Time Travel: a constellation workshop with Marianne Connor

The Futuring Lab seeks to question, discover, and remake chrono-logical representations of time. In response to pervading anxieties about the near future–  concerns about climate destabilization, rising social inequity, racism, political division, and ecological collapse, among other things– this timely exhibition employs the practice of futuring to generate new building blocks for imagining futures that are not only possible and probable but also preferable. Futuring is a pluralistic practice; there is not one future, but many; it is interdisciplinary, democratic, and inclusive of many voices. Futuring is not an escape from the present, rather it is an awareness of our becoming at this moment, which can help increase our insight and response-ability to the long and thick now.  

For this exhibition, the Design Building Gallery will feature a large interactive wall installation where visitors can post personal and political events, historic and speculative, known and unknown. This interactive Khronika pushes against the sequential and linear flow of past-present-future to envision a nonlinear entanglement of human and more-than-human events spanning the current millennium and beyond. In this effort to un-map the dominant capitalist and colonial narratives of time, the Khronika makes visible a cascade of mattering whereby the past is yet-to-come and futures re-member the forgotten. The practice of futuring extends beyond end-of-world narratives and asks us to consider both old and new economies, ecologies, and cultures of collective emancipation. 

4:30 Reception

5:15 Gallery Talk

5:45 James Joyce reading by Katherine O'Callaghan with a musical performance by Ben Richter 

6:00 Musical Performance by Jonathan Hulting-Cohen, "Fluid Interference" (2022) by Aron Dahl

7th Annual Normand Berlin lecture with Debapriya Sarkar (Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut) 

Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called 'Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms' (2019). She is author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (U Penn 2023), which traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. Most recently, she has published, “Ecocriticism and the Geographies of Race” in The Sundial. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections.

The dynamics of the Anthropocene present fundamental challenges to traditional disciplinary silos and their capacity to understand systems and respond to crises. To tell the story of the Anthropocene better and to allow acting on the  possibilities for transformative change and just futures, the Anthropocene Lab at UMass Amherstwill bring together an interdisciplinary group of humanists, scientists, social scientists, and artists to pilot a survey of critical literature on the Anthropocene. 
 
These cross-campus, “Thinking the Earth” seminars offer interested faculty and graduate students a platform to engage one of the most contested and noteworthy developments in intellectual history. The way we imagine speak or write about, or represent the Anthropocene are of critical importance at a time of climate change. 

 Register Online Here Email ttissera@umass.edu for more information.

In its second year, the Energy Transition Symposium at UMass Amherst is an opportunity for students, faculty, and staff across the UMass Amherst campus to present their work on clean energy, climate, and decarbonization. This event is open to all fundamental and applied areas of energy research and climate action work including (but not limited to) work in STEM, social sciences, humanities, business, and interdisciplinary studies. We welcome area schools, colleges, and community members to attend.

The event will consist of several parallel poster sessions and an early career panel discussion.

Please join us for the opening reception of Artist in Residence Suzette Martin's exhibit of original work, Apocalypse: Science & Myth.

Suzette Marie Martin is a figurative painter based in New England. She uses archetypal figures, the narrative potential of body language, scientific data and allusions to mythology to examine the existential trauma of environmental collapse, and explore emotional response to rational evidence. Martin's practice, rooted in drawing and developed in series, is informed by observational studies, art historical reference and topical research. Her combinations of wet and dry media create layers of gestural and textural marks, erasures, opaque passages and translucent washes that expose a working process of obscuring and revealing elements of figuration, text and abstraction.

The Early Modern Incubator Venn Vision group
Leslie Dartmouth Center for the Humanities
Dartmouth College

A Talk by Marjorie Rubright
Associate Professor of English, UMass Amherst
Director of the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies

Christopher Nygren is associate professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the intersection of religion, philosophy, and art in the Italian Renaissance, and it has been featured in The Art Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, Word & Image, Modern Language Notes, and other leading academic journals. 

Will Steffen is an assistant professor of English at American International College in Springfield, MA. He earned his PhD from UMass Amherst in 2018. His dissertation, Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage, won the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize at the 2020 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. His forthcoming book, Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage, (April 2023, Oxford University Press) positions the early modern stage as a key resource in evaluating the role of human agency in the narrative about global climate change.

Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, where she teaches the histories of science, climate, colonialism, and environment. 

Professor Chaplin’s publications include The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012), and (coauthored), The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (2016)

This is event is cohosted with the Five College Book History Seminar.

This talk will be held via Zoom. Register here.