Imperial Climates: Environmental Representation in Nineteenth-Century British Imperial Literature

This course uses a literary framework to examine how climate, environment, and ecological change have been imagined, narrated, and contested across nineteenth-century British imperial literature. Drawing on interdisicplinary climate humanities frameworks, we will investigate how Anglophone writers represented climate as both a physical, affective, and cultural force. We will simultaneously look at works by writers who resisted imperial ideologies and practices or provided alternative genealogies of self and society. Foregrounding literature as a mode of climate knowledge production in the nineteenth century, the course explores issues such as health, race, empire, labor, religion, and place. As we study literary representations of nineteenth-century climates, we will reflect on how the climate crisis is taking shape today, particularly how it impacts human relationships, psychology, and aesthetic representation.

Ecology, Religion, and Sovereignty in the Plays of Rabindranath Tagore

This course examines how ecological concerns, religious commitment, and self‑mastery intersect in the dramatic works of Rabindranath Tagore. Through plays such as Red Oleanders, The Waterfall, The Cycle of Spring, Sacrifice, Chitra, and Sanyasi, students explore how Tagore uses myth, allegory, and performance to critique modernity, articulate ecological ethics, and envision alternative forms of collective liberation. Tagore’s dramatic corpus illuminates how social customs shape ecological ethics and belonging, how exploitative resource extraction transforms landscapes and communities, and how the practices of compassion, renunciation, and repair can yield new forms of sovereignty. The course encourages students to critically examine taken‑for‑granted concepts such as nature, nation, gender, purity, sovereignty, and spiritual legitimacy. Students will generate new forms of climate knowledge through literary analysis, philosophical inquiry, and cross‑cultural interpretation, situating Tagore’s dramatic imagination within broader conversations about environmental and social justice.