Awareness of the ecological crisis has taken hold in various disciplines within the social sciences and humanities—from history and philosophy to anthropology and literature—particularly since the 1970s. This has led to a more careful reflection on concepts of nature, the relationships between humans and the rest of nature, and an engagement with questions of global environmental justice and responsibility. At the same time, growing ecological awareness in these disciplines has led to very different scholarly responses in terms of theories and methods, as well as themes and geographical focuses.

In recent decades, the term “Environmental Humanities” has emerged to capture this growing connection between environmental history, ecocriticism, environmental ethics, and political ecology, while also integrating debates that were previously largely shaped by different disciplinary contexts.

The DFG Heisenberg Professorship contributes to the Environmental Humanities both through concrete, empirical research projects within the framework of interdisciplinary environmental history and through projects at the theoretical and conceptual level: What value does the past hold in debates about the Anthropocene? And what does interdisciplinarity mean in this context?