ABSTRACT

Increasingly across the humanities, climate change has moved to the forefront of the agenda. This movement has been formalized under the label Environmental Human ities, which covers and contains a wide range of innovative approaches within history and literary and cultural studies concerned with re-centering the environment within the humanities. Here we report on a particular teaching effort that, although it can broadly be seen as part of this environmental humanism, also differs from it by its systematic focus on the temporal dimension of humanenvironment relations. At Aarhus University in Denmark, second-year undergraduate students are given the opportunity to broaden their disciplinary horizons by enrolling in so-called elective subjects worth ten European Transfer Credits. These “humanities electives are interdisciplinary courses of relevance to all humanities BA students at Arts” (“Humanities Electives”); their aim is to foster and promote competencies in interdisciplinarity (see Table 15.1). In 2013/2014, the opportunity to design such an elective was seized by a group

of humanities scholars from across several disciplines: archaeology,1 classical studies, theology, comparative and Nordic literature. In the spirit of providing research-led teaching, this initiative grew out of past and on-going projects such as the Laboratory for Past Disaster Science and the Climate|Culture|Catastrophe Network (C3NET). The foundational rationale for this course has been outlined by Mike Hulme, professor of climate and culture at King’s College, London (Hulme, “Climate Change” and “Conquering”). To us, Hulme highlights several important issues. First, he notes that the

discourse about climate and climate change is also a discourse about catastrophe, about collapse, about apocalypse (cf. Nielsen). Second, he argues that in order to better understand human-climate/environment relations we need to investigate the many complex relationships between these multi-facetted factors across time and space. Thirdly and finally, Hulme argues that such investigations can be genuinely useful in preparing for the future.