Posted January 15, 2025:
I am pleased to note that I am teaching a course on Nature Memoirs this spring at Fordham University. This course brings together a lot of the research I have been doing on the environment with an interest in how humans understand, relate to, and even require nature. My course description and a brief reading list is included below. I’ll also follow up with a subsequent update on the course’s Tiny Ecology Project, which I am quite excited about.
Course Description: Nature Memoir
Recent decades have seen significant growth in a field of writing known as the nature memoir, in which authors explore how nature has impacted and enriched their lives, even as many people feel further from the natural world than ever before. Refusing the idea that nature exists as some ideal space “over there,” in nature memoirs we find authors engaging with nature to better understand both themselves and the world they live in. Together we will explore the relationship between one’s personal life and the natural world by reading and discussing course texts that consider the connection between the human and more-than-human world. These include Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, and the poetry collection You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, as well as the broader cultural and historical contexts in which these texts are written and received.