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.

Image: Prayer for Burnt Forests workshop led by artist Julie Weitz at Limestone Canyon Nature Preserve, May 20, 2023, co-hosted by UCI Living with Wildfire Initiative, Environmental Humanities Research Center, Department of Art History, and Irvine Ranch Conservancy. Photo credit: Myra McCants.

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

The 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 and co-sponsoring a series of events, including lectures, film screenings, reading groups, and workshops on a variety of topics to better understand and address our human enmeshment within the environment. We are always looking to collaborate with other centers in the School of Humanities and other schools across the UCI campus in order to build a robust coalition for climate action and justice, so please reach out if would like to become involved in the center’s work.

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.

Jon L Pitt
Director, Environmental Humanities Research Center
Associate Professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities
East Asian Studies Department
Affiliate Faculty in Religious Studies & Critical Theory