The UCI Environmental Humanities Research Center addresses contemporary and historical approaches to understanding environment and climate through expressions of culture. Promoting research, teaching, and collaborative community outreach, the Environmental Humanities recognizes that meaningful climate action will require every member of our society to alter the ways that we think and act in our shared environment. Scholars across the humanities seek to understand and respond creatively to how humans make sense of the world. Doing so for our environment means parsing the political conditions, legacies of imperialism, economic ideologies, and relationships between culture and technology that produced and continue to exacerbate the Earth’s precarious climate crisis. Through making connections and generating new ideas across its varied programming, the Environmental Humanities Research Center seeks to promote environmental justice and meaningful environmental change.

Learn more: UCI launches Environmental Humanities Research Center

Welcome to the Environmental Humanities Research Center at the University of California, Irvine.

We are a new center formed in 2022 to address contemporary and historical approaches to understanding environment and climate through expressions of culture. This year we will be hosting a series of exciting events, including performances, film screenings, lectures, and workshops across a breadth of investigations to understand and address our environment. Through collaborations with other centers in the School of Humanities and other schools across the UCI campus, we are excited to continue building a robust coalition for climate action and justice.

The UCI EHRC recognizes our location on traditional, unceded Acjachemen and Tongva territory and supports each nation’s respective struggles for land rights and cultural preservation.


James Nisbet
Director, Environmental Humanities Research Center
Department of Art History
PhD Program in Visual Studies