Education & Opportunities

Spotlight on new Programs and courses

New course on Biological Diversity and Human Experience in Fall 2022

This seminar will analyze how the problems related to diversity today have been conceived historically through the emergence of scientific fields that became independent from philosophy. This resulted from the discoveries of the nineteenth century, when such disciplinary boundaries had not yet been established. What is today biology and anthropology were then considered philosophical areas of inquiry. We would like to explore the development of
new disciplines, particularly after the emergence of evolutionary science, address how the concept of humanity came to be, and the meaning of human experience in the context of evolutionary discoveries. We would also analyze how a return to research that integrates biological diversity with other disciplines can provide different epistemological insights. We contend that understanding diversity as a problem that is interdisciplinary and humanistic can help to integrate an ethical awareness that is critical for addressing institutional racism and other forms of discrimination in academia. This seminar is part of the 2021-2022 USF Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship bestowed to the the members of the Evolution Working Group: Alex Levine, Lorena Madrigal, Adriana Novoa, Christina Richards.

 

New Environmental Humanities initiative at USF

The Environmental Humanites is a wide field of study that engages with central and pressingenvironmental and human dilemmas as well as with issues of equity and social justice in a time of rapid change. Humanities scholars from different disciplines are at the forefront of the response to climate change and sustainability efforts acknowledging the link between environmental degradation and social inequality. They also strive to find points of contact between the nature-culture separation that underlies traditional conceptions of scientific and humanistic disciplines. The Environmental Humanites Initiative at the University of South Florida is spearheaded by Dr. Patrizia La Trecchia (World Langauges) with the aim of acknowledging the contribution of the Humanities to the mitigation of the current environmental crisis within a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective. The critical study of food is an integral part of the initiative, given its centrality to culture, history, and the social sciences, together with issues related to the environmental justice movement, food justice, extractivism, waste, and the visual communication of just sustainability. 

 

New course in Environmental Humanities in Fall 2022 

As part of the Environmental Humanities initiative, This course, offered by Dr. Patrizia La Trecchia, will examine a range of environmentally themed issues facing our society through an overview of the entanglements of humans and things and our relationship with a variety of nonhuman contexts in a transnational perspective. 

 

Institute Fellows 

2018-2019 Anthropocene Graduate Fellows