Project: Humanities for the Environment

David Phillips received Mellon Foundation funds through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), based at Duke University, as part of Integrating Humanities across National Boundaries: The Promise of CHCI. The CHCI launched two projects as part of this grant. One was Humanities for the Environment, with research centers, or observatories, in North America, Australia, and Europe. The project asks how humanities discourse and tools can respond to a moment of planetary crisis, when human activity is eroding the future. The WFU Humanities Institute leads the South Cluster of the North American Observatory, collaborating with the Humanities Institutes at Stony Brook University and the University of Minnesota. In the first two project periods, it convened research teams to survey and collect the history of environmental change in each partner’s region; conducted and recorded interviews with community leaders and regional activists; and joined representatives of the North and West Clusters and newly forming observatories in Africa and Asia at an international conference at the University of Wisconsin Madison, with a view toward continuing the project beyond the current grant period. In addition, with the help of web designers, Dr. Phillips developed and launched a website to document and disseminate results.