Pollyanna Rhee (Landscape Architecture) and John Levi Barnard (English/Comparative and World Literature) are co-directors of the HRI 2024-25 Research Cluster “Environmental Humanities.” Professor Rhee recently answered questions about the group and the benefits of working collaboratively.

HRI Research Cluster funds support the efforts of scholars with shared interests to explore subjects or problems which they might lack the resources to do on their own.

For those who are not familiar with your cluster, can you offer a brief summary of your topic? Was this a new or an already existing collaboration?

Our cluster brings together faculty and students who are broadly interested in humanistic and qualitative approaches to environmental issues. Interests range from literary studies of energy, species extinction, and infrastructure to classical reception of ideas of nature to historians working on landscape painting, the environmental movement, and land surveys. The main starting point for the cluster was the Mellon Foundation-supported Emerging Areas in the Humanities program housed at HRI from 2018 to 2020. The faculty and students involved in that program have sustained the Research Cluster to this day.

How does being part of an HRI Research Cluster support your research?

The major way is through our regular works-in-progress workshops where we share articles and chapters in progress to share with people of a wide variety of scholarly backgrounds. While we each have our individual scholarly domains, the Research Cluster provides valuable feedback and questions that allows our members to think more broadly about their work. The cluster has also been a wonderful opportunity to invite scholars from across the United States and abroad to share work through regular conferences and book talks.

In addition to bringing people together, the Research Cluster has been a way of learning more about the resources and facilities on campus, such as through organized tours of the Abbott Power Plant. We definitely hope to do more to be involved with related initiatives on campus.

What does interdisciplinary collaboration in the humanities look like through the lens of this project? How do you engage collaboratively?

For many of the us in the humanities, the single-authored book or article is the default research output, so a lot of the collaboration within the cluster has been through sharing and commenting on others’ work. That said, we are actively interested in collaborative possibilities in research and teaching on environmental themes with the expertise we have among our members. We’d very much welcome the participation of people in more traditionally technical fields who have an interest in humanities perspectives on environmental topics to join us.

Are there any upcoming initiatives from the Environmental Humanities cluster that we can share?

Anyone is welcome to join us and we love to have new people share their works-in-progress to the group. In April 2025, we will host a visiting researcher in sociology from Australian National University, Matthew Darmour-Paul, who is working on a project on the development of the “Silicon Prairie” in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. Individual members on campus are also very busy with related events such as the European Union Center’s SMAART Symposium on Climate Justice and Climate Futures organized by Jessica Greenberg and Jamie Jones and will feature presentations by our Research Cluster members that will be held in early March.

Why should other humanists at Illinois consider applying for HRI research cluster support?

With such a vast campus, a research cluster is an amazing way to bring people together across shared interests.