Doctoral Supervision
Graduate students in the Environmental Humanities work with supervisors in departments throughout the university within the framework offered by the Graduate School for the Humanities on broad range of projects. In addition to the support offered by the graduate school, PhD candidates in the Environmental Humanities meet regularly for a colloquium and to participate in workshops, symposia, and conferences organized by the EH research cluster.
Pearl-Sue Carper
E-Mail: pearl-sue.carper@uni-wuerzburg.de
Project Start: 2021
Project Description
the importance of the rosehip and the discourses and possibilities that this opens up. Known in everyday culture as a 'native' wild fruit and located regionally, the fruit of the rose is used in a variety of ways and, as a hedge plant, is not only part of the landscape design, but also essential for the everyday life of human and non-human creatures, for example in the form of food. Despite its wide distribution as a domestic rose tree and its local cultivation, it is largely imported into Germany for industrial processing into teas, jams, cosmetics, etc.
The focus of this work is the interweaving of locality and globality, non-human planted stocks and plantation cultivation, economic and ecological aspects as well as the common development of humans, plants and animals. Using the example of the everyday fruit rosehip, these complex relationships are analyzed against the background of current ecological crises, with recourse to post-anthropocentric theories, and the power of action and effectiveness of the rosehip is worked out. In this way, the study would like to contribute to the understanding of the design possibilities of rural areas and economies as well as the production of basic products of human life under the conditions of the Anthropocene.
Molina Klingler
E-Mail: molina.klingler@uni-wuerzburg.de
Project Start: 2019
Project Description
How is life narrated? Declared as an unalienable right in the Declaration of Independence, the security of life is one of the natural rights on which democracy is firmly grounded. How is this connection between life and rights narrated? Arguing that the literary imagination partakes in shaping the political and legal public discourse, this project explores contemporary speculative writing in order to investigate the conceptual changes in the intricate relation between /life/ and /rights/. With a growing sense of environmental awareness, and then particularly with the rise of theories of the Anthropocene, a paradigmatic shift becomes apparent: our understanding of life moves from an anthropocentric towards an ecocentric perspective.
My project looks at speculative stories of entangled human and other-than-human lives, which offer a testing ground for the idea of a multispecies democracy. Disclosing the connections between human rights, environmental history, earth jurisprudence, and speculative writing, I assess cultural narratives about the inalienable rights we associate with life, and the literary representations of life itself.
Camille Lavoix
E-Mail: camille.lavoix@stud-mail.uni-wuerzburg.de
Project Start: 2020
Project Description
The African savannah covers about 13.5 million km², that is most of Africa south of the Sahara. 75% of these lands have already been decimated (Riggio et al. 2013). Some living beings are being swept away with them, others, starting with pangolins and bats, are cramped and share their breath-stealing viruses with humans. This disappearing savannah has been written and described by colonisers infected with another virus, racism, equally asphyxiating, and coupled with exotism, misogyny and specism. But the savannah is writing back, literature offering a formidable platform for rethinking this space, which is as concrete as it is symbolic. Writers sharing roots with West Africa offer invaluable perspectives for re-enchanting the savannah, going beyond criticism of exploitation and imagining relationships between living beings other than those of domination. This thesis aims to search for the dissident imaginaries and plural ethos nurtured by these authors. The hunting songs, poems, tales and science fiction flourishing in this region, mostly francophone, contain alternative representations that have so far been little explored by the currents of ecocriticism and écopoétique. Several academics, including Elizabeth Deloughrey and Byron Caminero-Santangelo, have recognised that this literary movement at the crossroads between environment and literature has been predominantly white and anglophone. This project therefore intends to participate in the blossoming of a francophone and anglophone African ecrocritic/poétique movement by investigating dissident representations of the savannah.
Hannah Nelson-Teutsch
E-Mail: hannah.nelson-teutsch@uni-wuerzburg.de
Project Start: 2019
Project Description
In the year 1500 Christopher Columbus declared to the Court of Spain that “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John, and he showed me the spot where to find it.” From the Columbian arrival onwards, the intertwining of apocalyptic and landscape have been fundamental to imagining and transforming America. And yet, more than five centuries of scholarship have yielded not one single publication dedicated to the study of apocalyptic landscape in America. I propose to begin the work of unearthing the many ways in which American territory has become apocalyptic landscape, and how the unique material and discursive figuration of these spaces informs the ways in which apocalyptic landscapes are understood, accessed, and managed.
Marie-Elisabeth Perschthaler
E-Mail: elisabeth.perschthaler@uni-wuerzburg.de
Project Start: 2024
Project Description
Human autonomy is a key element of Enlightenment philosophy. Freedom of thought and the independence of the individual themselves from external constraints are core ideas which have become almost dogmatic within European-Western culture. However, it is also partly responsible for a present in which the individual has become isolated rather than emancipated, in which supposed freedom has turned out to be a lack of orientation. In society, this has manifested in a culture of mistrust towards the other, both between human beings and in our interactions with the non-human world. The threats of the climate catastrophe and the exploitation of animals are characteristic of this development.
The French philosopher Corine Pelluchon is rethinking the Enlightenment. In her work she outlines the project of a “philosophy of corporality”, which draws on the passivity and vulnerability of the subject and counters the Enlightenment’s view on man with an alternative, characterized by his relationality and receptivity. Highly pertinent issues regarding climate change and democracy are revisited in the framework of an ethical “scheme of consideration”.
The dissertation pursues two objectives:
Firstly, it aims to reconstruct Pelluchon’s philosophical work. The philosophical and theological theories that form its background will be identified in this context and examined regarding questions of contemporary both Protestant and non-theological ethics.
The second aim of the work is to examine the connection between transformation –a central concept in Pelluchon’s philosophy –and the role of ethics in the face of current crises. The thesis focuses on intersections between Protestant ethics, which operates primarily through processes of deliberation, and Pelluchon’s own transformational approach.
Lena Pfeifer
E-Mail: lena.pfeifer@uni-wuerzburg.de
Project Start: 2020
Anthropocene Affordances: Scale, Narrative Form, and Representations of the Human in Anthropocene Narratives
The Anthropocene describes a new geological epoch in which the degree of human intervention with the geophysical dynamics of the Earth system has come to resemble that of a geological force. From a cultural perspective, the Anthropocene also marks a profound rupture with conventional forms of narrating human existence and, essentially, with what it means to be human. This dissertation project investigates the narrative forms and techniques employed in a selection of Anthropocene narratives (both fictional and nonfictional) written between 2010 and 2020 to critically engage the new role of the human in the Anthropocene. Borrowing from New Formalism, I engage the term Anthropocene Affordances to discern which forms of critical reflection are facilitated by, and emerge from, the Anthropocene as a critical concept.
Krister Steffens
E-Mail: krister.steffens@uni-wuerzburg.de
Project Start: 2021
Project Description
Knowledge and Practice in Vegan Agriculture
“Vegane Landwirtschaft im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Wissen und Praxis” (working title)
Fruit and vegetables are vegan. Or are they? Whoever follows the argumentation of actors of ‘vegan agriculture’ will not be able to affirm this statement without restrictions. Due to the widespread use of animal fertilizers in agricultural production, most fruit and vegetable production is also indirectly or directly part of livestock farming and, thus, from a corresponding perspective, not vegan. Other practices that appear questionable in terms of vegan agriculture (e.g. the use of pesticides) are also criticized. Consequently, vegan agriculture opposes concepts of ‘classical’ organic or conventional agriculture with alternative understanding and practices.
This dissertation project approaches, with a focus on the German-speaking countries, the topic of ‘vegan agriculture’/‘vegan farming’ in the sense of cultural anthropological research by applying different qualitative methods. The study explores various questions, such as: How the concept of ‘vegan agriculture’/‘vegan farming’ developed? Which knowledge systems, discourses, actors and practices underlie this field of phenomena? And which cultural and social practices are produced by them? Among others, perspectives on agrarian economy, rural space, ways of eating and living, animal-human relationships, multispecies perspectives and different areas of ethics come into consideration.
