Interdisciplinary, environment and humanities are words that are strongly associated with a Dickinson education, and Professor William Gleason, chair of Princeton’s English Department, is putting them into action.

During Gleason’s visit to Dickinson on Nov. 2 and 3, he worked with several students, visited classes, had lunch discussions and gave two important lectures.

On Nov 2, Gleason gave a lecture to about 25 Dickinson students and faculty called “Future of Environmental Humanities.” The talk centered on Gleason’s third and forthcoming book, “Keywords for Environmental Studies,” which will be published in February 2016.

The book, Gleason explained, presents definitions of key terms emerging in all aspects of the environmental studies field. He stressed the importance of “talking across disciplines,” going beyond simply paralleling topics between fields but making real connections between them – “I think that’s key,” he said.

In order to demonstrate the highly interdisciplinary nature of environmental studies, Gleason and his co-editors reached out to scholars of numerous disciplines to write the keyword entries. They “tried to assign terms to not the most obvious writer.” For example, he said, “we gave ‘culture’ to a geographer.”

After a discussion of the terms in the book, Gleason moved on to four key predictions about the future of the environmental humanities field. He said that the field would become “increasingly international,” develop a “more integrative pedagogy,” gain a “greater involvement of the arts” and make a “wider pivot to the public,” away from academia and toward other communities. 

Gleason is particularly interested in sharing his ideas at Dickinson because the college is considered a leader in environmental education. He called Dickinson a “model” for environmental studies, citing the college’s interdisciplinary approach and the students’ genuine interest in sustainability courses.

The audience at the lecture was engaged in Gleason’s ideas, as evidenced by the question and answer portion. Students and faculty responded to Gleason’s talk with several generative questions, which led to a lively discussion. Several faculty members responded to Gleason’s ideas about the future of teaching in environmental studies and humanities, offering their own experiences, problems and successes in the field. Students offered questions about how the field might change going forward.

“As someone who is considering going into the teaching field, it was fun to watch the discourse unfold around the future of environmental curriculum,” Emily Davis ’16, an environmental studies major, said. 

Kate King ’18 agreed, explaining that she felt, as an environmental science major, that she experiences the interdisciplinary nature of the field at Dickinson.

“The idea that a whole field is emerging to study similar interactions is awesome because it means that more people are realizing how important the environment is to our everyday lives,” she said.

While he does not feel that his biochemistry & molecular biology major at Dickinson has quite as much of an interdisciplinary focus, Andrew McGowan ’16 said that he “enjoyed how [Gleason] reconciled the various ways we think about the environment.”

Gleason situated his study in the context of an emerging field, one in which he says Dickinson is an important leader. He believes that the environmental studies field is an excellent opportunity to investigate a “core intersection between the human and the natural,” and that Dickinson is participating in that discovery.