By the Humanities Council
This year a Humanities Council working group takes its conversations beyond the campus and into the public domain, responding to and addressing key social and environmental issues.
The Bodies of Knowledge Working Group, founded by Elena Fratto (Slavic Languages and Literatures) and supported by the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, enters its third year with a new format for fall. With colleagues Franz Prichard (East Asian Studies) and Ryo Morimoto (Anthropology), Fratto will convene a two-day symposium which invites the public to explore the field of Environmental Humanities. The virtual gathering “Russia/ Japan: Residues, Materialities, Environments: Trans-disciplinary Exchanges,” features speakers from across the country and abroad to look at the cultural responses of Russia and Japan beyond the comparative studies of the Chernobyl and the Fukushima disasters, exploring their relationship with and understanding and articulation of environmental questions and issues of nuclear energy.
Leading literary and media scholars of Japan and of Russia and the Soviet Union of different generations will seek to generate new avenues of inquiry into natural catastrophe, food studies, sound studies, ocean studies, and the inescapable embeddedness of human organisms and human activity within the earth, nature, value systems, and the distribution of knowledge. The symposium will take place on October 16 and 17.
