More than five years ago, Yale Environmental Humanities was launched as a platform to highlight and support the emerging interdisciplinary conversation, across departments and schools, about environmental problems and human connections to the natural world.
Today, environmental themes are deeply intertwined with the humanities across a broad range of disciplines at Yale - classics and comparative literature, architecture and American studies, among others.
"Yale has hired a remarkable group of environmental humanities faculty who have been developing and offering new courses," said Paul Sabin, faculty director for Yale Environmental Humanities and the Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). "This growth in faculty expertise really reflects how scholarly approaches to the humanities and the environment are breaking new conceptual ground in many disciplines."
The catalogue of course listings in the environmental humanities for the spring 2026 semester includes 42 undergraduate courses and 36 graduate courses. (Environmental humanities is not an official subject designation; courses are designated as falling under that umbrella by the program based on their relevance.) They include courses that, like the literature seminar "Being Human in the Anthropocene," are heavily steeped in environmentalism and climate change, and others, like "Food and Wine in the Ancient Greek World," that are focused on the social and cultural dimensions of food, water, animals, plants, landscapes, and other natural elements.
Together, the overall breadth of offerings reflects what Sabin calls "an explosion in interest and creative approaches."
Collected here are samplings from environmental humanities courses offered over the past academic year.
