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Earthworlds: Life in a Turbulent Planet
June 24 – Aug. 22, 2025
We don’t live on Earth. We live in it, caught in the whirl of energy, story, matter, and meaning through which a planet becomes a home. But whose home? And how? In this course, we will investigate the interconnectedness of Earthly beings, elements, and narratives through which humans and other organisms fashion their worlds. Offering an introduction to the interdisciplinary field known as environmental humanities, the course will invite students to think about how different organisms, peoples, bodies, and stories make (and remake) worlds within the Earth. We will ask how planetary forces shape life here in Cascadia, on the edge of the Pacific, and how our locality is entangled with other sites and histories. We will trace the movement of species and peoples; examine Earthforms like rivers and mountains alongside nominally-human infrastructures like cities, plantations, and roads. Together, we will trouble the difference between human and natural history and contemplate elements like stone, water, air, water and fire. We will ask how differential identities of race, sexuality, religion, culture, and species are intertwined with infrastructures of power, energy, politics, religion, and law.
The course will be modeled on collaborative projects like The Feral Atlas and Cascadia Field Guide which invite readers to explore the entanglements between art and science, humans and other species. These projects provide models both for our own inquiry, and the collaborative sprit in which it will be undertaken. Course materials will range widely, including poems, essays, novels, films, and other media. We will also get outside the classroom through field trips and excursions. Assignments will provide opportunities to explore writing in different styles. Students will conduct research projects of their own design, and have the option of pursuing creative alternatives to more traditional academic essays (maps, stories, films, video games, art installations, apps, songs) and/or of pursuing collaborative projects if they so choose.
Teaching Team
Jesse Oak Taylor
Jesse Oak Taylor is a Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle and faculty coordinator for a new interdisciplinary minor in Sustainability and Environmental Justice. Taylor is the author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016), which won both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) book award in ecocriticism and the Sonia Rudikoff prize for a first book in Victorian Studies from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA). He is also co-editor (with Tobias Menely) of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, (2017), and co-author (with Daniel C. and Carl E. Taylor), of Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: From Seeds of Human Energy to a Scale of Global Change (2011), as well as numerous articles and book chapters about the environmental humanities. Along with Jason Groves (UW German), he led a Simpson Center Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on the Anthropocene from 2016-2019. He received the English Department’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2024.
Ipsita Dey
Comparative History of Ideas, Assistant Professor
Ipsita Dey is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department. She comes to UW Seattle from Princeton University, where she received her PhD in Anthropology. Her work is at the intersection of Pacific Island Studies, Indigeneity Studies, South Asian Diaspora Studies, Environmental Anthropology, and ethnographic ethics. Ipsita’s current book project, “Home on the Fijian Farmscape”, explores how Indo-Fijians articulate connections to land and country through agricultural practice, claiming a complex mode of diasporic nativity in response to resurgent Fijian indigenous ethno-nationalist politics.
Andrés Ayala-Patlán
English, Doctoral Student
Andrés Ayala-Patlán is a doctoral student in English at the University of Washington, where he teaches courses in composition and exposition. His research focuses on the intersections of decolonial studies and the environmental humanities in the contemporary Americas, particularly in Latinx, Black, and Indigenous literatures. His work explores the relationship among decolonial imaginaries, planetary thought, and ecopoetics as a form of resistance and world building within the emerging field of decolonial planetary ecologies. His recent article, “Self-Change as Global Change: Spiritual Activism and Its Place in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Legacy” (University of Toronto Quarterly, 2024), marks important developments for Anzaldúa’s legacy, philosophy, and spirituality in her late works. He also has a forthcoming book chapter, “Ontoplanetary Imaginaries: Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s New Tribalism and Its Critical Imaginary Praxis,” for The Critical and Interdisciplinary Displacement Studies Reader (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2025). He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Cal Poly Pomona, an M.H. (Master of Humanities) from University of Colorado, and an M.A. in English, Language, and Literature from University of Washington.
Students
Click here to meet the students of the 2025 Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities.