This course surveys landscape histories from a distinct perspective— to explore landscape processes and their knowledges over time, to think about the material cultures of landscape, to better understand changing landscapes, and to understand the stakes of changing landscapes now. Global in method, though with developments in North America at its center, this class orients students to landscape histories and the landscape studies of found and designed landscapes through geology, pedology, physiography, climate, vegetation, ecology, and more. Episodic rather than survey-like or encyclopedic, the course moves chronologically, thematically, and regionally, placing landscapes alongside other historical and interdisciplinary fields and voices, focusing on landscape processes that intersect with human (and nonhuman) lives in different regions. Each place, discipline, field, author, or object we encounter is always understood in a conversation to comprehend systemic environmental change, ideas of nature, ecological politics, landscape transformation, and more.
The class offers tools grounded in the humanities for interpreting found and designed landscapes, such as different ways of periodizing the past, narrating diverse voices and perspectives, and mapping historical change. In addition to reading, analyzing, and discussing texts, the course includes several short collaborative projects involving additional archival visits, short readings, and engaged research site tours in which students are asked to participate. The course teaches students concrete skills for reading the landscape: map reading, understanding human settlement over time, exploring archives, analyzing photography, understanding objects, analyzing histories of transportation networks, infrastructures of water supply, sewage, energy, landscape construction, and material histories. After completing this course, students should have the skills to research and interpret landscapes over time.
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