Subject Liaison
Ulrich's
- Ulrich's Global Serials Directory This link opens in a new windowListings of 250,000 periodicals, serials, annuals, continuations, and conference proceedings in 2600 subject areas from over 200 countries. Includes indexing information and some full-text reviews. Updated weekly.
Reference Sources
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature This link opens in a new windowThe Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature contains over 400 articles and aims to map, over time, the world’s entire landscape of literary expressions and criticism, weaving together the various fields and approaches that make up literature.
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science This link opens in a new windowThe Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science is updated monthly and includes multi-media features embedded in articles, along with cross-referenced links. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science contains in-depth peer-reviewed articles and broad coverage of the field.
- The Encyclopedia MythicaEncyclopedia Mythica is an internet encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, and religion.
Recommended Book Series
The Bloomsbury Cultural History series takes a topic and looks at it through the ages from antiquity to modernity. We have access to some volumes of possible interest online and others in print format. Here are a few that might be of interest:
A Cultural History of Animals by Call Number: Print - Fine Arts, Ivy (note vol. 2 has separate record in Virgo)ISBN: 9781845204969Publication Date: 2007
A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity by Call Number: Ebook - Access through link or using database Bloomsbury Cultural HistoryISBN: 9781350093799Publication Date: 2023
A Cultural History of Plants by Call Number: Ebook - Access through link or using database Bloomsbury Cultural HistoryISBN: 9781474273596Publication Date: 2022
A Cultural History of Law in the Middle Ages by Call Number: Print - Law (use LEO to request) - K150 .C85 2019 V.2ISBN: 9781474212533Publication Date: 2021
Helpful URLs
- Ask a LibrarianQuestions? Ask us! Chat, call, text, or email anytime.
- Purchase RecommendationsIs there an ebook you think the UVA Library should own but doesn't? Make a purchase recommendation.
Research Help
This guide is intended to provide ideas on where to conduct recent research into environmental humanities as well as possible avenues for your conference talk areas of interest. If you would like personalized research help, please email me your questions and/or set up a time to meet with me either in person or onZoom. You can schedule an appointment with me on Zoom by clicking the button in my information box to the left, by selecting a day/time on my Make an Appointment page, or by contacting me directly at slb4kt@virginia.edu. If you would prefer to meet in person, please email me and we'll find a mutually agreeable time.
Need help right away? Please contact a librarian using one of our Ask a Librarian options.
Environmental Humanities Journals
- Environmental HumanitiesEnvironmental Humanities is a peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal. The journal publishes outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship that draws humanities disciplines into conversation with each other, and with the natural and social sciences, around significant environmental issues. Issues available 2012-present.
- Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental HumanitiesResilience is a digital, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for scholars from across humanities disciplines to speak to one another about their shared interest in environmental issues and to plot out an evolving conversation about what the humanities contribute to living and thinking sustainably in a world of dwindling resources. We have access from 2013-present through Project Muse.
- Lagoonscapes: The Venice Journal of Environmental HumanitiesLagoonscapes: The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities is a digital, open-access, international, and trans-disciplinary journal based at The New Institute Center for Environmental Humanities of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. Lagoonscapes welcomes submissions from all the core disciplines of the Environmental Humanities, including literary and media studies, critical theory, visual arts, environmental and cultural history, political theory, and anthropology. Venice and its lagoon are a privileged location for sensing and interrogating the effects of human activity and climate change regarding the biological, cultural, and social dynamics of local ecosystems. The journal is associated with the pioneering Master in Environmental Humanities offered by Ca’ Foscari University and it aspires to become an international platform for scholars, artists, and activists to engage with the growing field of the Environmental Humanities.
- Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) is the peer-reviewed, international, and transdisciplinary journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), published quarterly by Oxford University Press. Celebrating the rich confluence of environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and environmental justice, ISLE welcomes submissions from authors creatively engaging these fields from a broad range of disciplines, geographies, and perspectives. Available 1993-present
- Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental HumanitiesEcocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities (ISSN 2717-8943) is a digital, open-access, peer-reviewed, international, and transdisciplinary journal of the Environmental Humanities. It is a biannual journal, publishing a Winter issue in December and a Summer issue in June. It aims to develop new insights and theories about the current material and conceptual challenges in the field. Available June 2020-present.
- Ecozon@Ecozon@ is one of the very few academic journals specifically devoted to ecocriticism, an exponentially growing field, akin to the more recently developing area of environmental humanities, and the only one to accept submissions in several languages. Available 2010-present.
- Environmental HistoryEnvironmental History (EH) is the world’s leading scholarly journal in environmental history and the journal of record in the field. Scholarship published in EH explores the changing relationships between humans and the environment over time. This interdisciplinary journal brings together insights from geography, anthropology, the natural sciences, science and technology studies, political ecology, and many other disciplines to inform historical scholarship. Access available 1996 to present (earlier issues available under another title).
Databases for Environmental Humanities Research (or related research)
The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages, as well as film, television, and popular culture, including over 4,000 journals as well as books and dissertations. For articles not available full-text in MLA, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries,” or look up the journal title in VIRGO.
Environment Complete includes journal articles and some books on topics such as agriculture, the ecosystem, renewable energy sources, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, law, and policy, and urban planning.
Communication & Mass Media Complete provides coverage of journals in communication, mass media, and other closely-related fields of study. It provides indexing and abstracts for more than 570 journals, and selected coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of more than 770 titles.
Humanities International Complete indexes over 2000 journals as well as books and other publications. Topics covered include archaeology, art, dance, drama, ethnic and women's history, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, religion.
International Medieval Bibliography (IMB) lists articles from books and journals on any topic relating to the European Middle Ages (ca. 400-1500).
Project Muse provides full-text searching of recent articles from major scholarly journals, including roughly 120 journals about literature. Like JSTOR, Project Muse is not as comprehensive as the MLAIB, but offers the advantages of full-text searching and instant access to PDFs.
Scopus is an abstract and citation database that indexes content from more than 25,000 active titles and 7,000 publishers—all rigorously vetted and selected by an independent review board.
South Asia Archive consists of books, journals, and documents from India, Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. Documents are in a mix of English and vernacular languages, with fifteen percent of the archive’s content comprising material written primarily in Bengali, and also including some content in Sanskrit. The archive is incredibly diverse in its reach, with materials of interest to those studying across all main areas of the humanities and social sciences. Both historical primary documents and more recent reports and publications are available.
Depending on your area of research interest, we have hundreds more databases that could be of interest - see the Database A-Z list and talk to Sherri and Professor Ghaly for more ideas!
Database Collections of Primary Resources
- Environmental History This link opens in a new windowThe study of environmental history emerged in the 1960s, inspired by the popularity of emerging environmentalist movements, but concerns about human intervention and interaction with the natural environment can be traced much further back. Environmental History: Conservation and Public Policy in America, 1870-1980 documents the emergence of these concerns from different aspects of conservation and environmental public policy in North America in the modern era. The archive concentrates particularly on the role of various government agencies, conservation organizations and individual actors who pioneered the study of the natural environment and campaigned for its protection.
- Power to the People: Counterculture, Social Movements, and the Alternative Press This link opens in a new windowPower to the People: Counterculture, Social Movements, and the Alternative Press showcases a range of ideas, initiatives, and social movements devoted to people-powered politics and organizing from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. The archive paints a broad picture of the counterculture and many disparate organizations that represent this moment in modern Western history. Although the archive concentrates mainly on the United States and the United Kingdom, it also covers events and topics from around the globe.
- Archives of Sexuality and Gender This link opens in a new windowThis database contains five sections.
The Archives of Sexuality and Gender program provides a robust and significant collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. With material dating back to the sixteenth century, researchers and scholars can examine how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, erotica, and many other interesting topical areas. - Gilded Age and Progressive Era This link opens in a new windowExplore America’s transformative age of industrialisation, expanding wealth, inequality and social change. Personal collections, business records and rich visual content offer fresh perspectives on this influential period.
There are many more primary source collections online available for your research. See the English Language & Literature guide Primary Sources page for more examples or talk with Sherri for help in identifying other possible collections of interest.
Finding items using Virgo
Virgo, the UVA Library’s primary search tool, contains catalog records for books, print journals, DVDs, maps, and digitized materials, as well as links to online articles from our rich array of subscription journals. You can search catalog materials and articles together, or view those results separately, using the facets provided to limit your results by author, format, publication period, and more. To find online content in the catalog, use Format limiters like EBook, Streaming Video, or Online to limit your catalog search results.
Example subject terms:
- Conservation of Natural Resources in Literature
- Ecocriticism
- Ecology in Literature
- Ecolinguistics
- Environmentalism in Literature
- Global environmental change in literature
- Nature Conservation in Literature
- Philosophy of Nature in Literature
- Science news -- Moral and ethical aspects
Example E-Books of Interest
Below are just a few of many examples of print books and ebooks that discuss different research topics related to the environment in some way.
Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change by Call Number: E-book: Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781350296060Publication Date: 2023Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change, this open access book considers the various ways in which contemporary writers have evolved new and transformed modes of realism to grapple with the problems of living on an endangered planet. Focusing on fiction set in the 'long present' - a term used to cover the actual present, the near future and an historic past that interacts with the present - Thieme argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis on the grounds that it is a future threat. Thieme examines work by twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781517902360Publication Date: 2017Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent "arts of living." Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication's two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste--in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch.
Climate Lyricism by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781478015116Publication Date: 2022In Climate Lyricism, Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O'Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism--a mode of address in which a first-person "I" speaks to a "you" about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between "I" and "you" in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change.
Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction From the Inklings to Game of Thrones by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781438470474Publication Date: 2018Fellow Inklings J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the mid-twentieth-century's triple threats of fascism, utilitarianism, and industrial capitalism. In Fire and Snow, Marc DiPaolo explores how the apocalyptic fantasy tropes and Christian environmental ethics of the Middle-earth and Narnia sagas have been adapted by a variety of recent writers and filmmakers of "climate fiction," a growing literary and cinematic genre that grapples with the real-world concerns of climate change, endless wars, and fascism, as well as the role religion plays in easing or escalating these apocalyptic-level crises. Among the many other well-known climate fiction narratives examined in these pages are Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, Mad Max, and Doctor Who. Although the authors of these works stake out ideological territory that differs from Tolkien's and Lewis's, DiPaolo argues that they nevertheless mirror their predecessors' ecological concerns. The Christians, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who penned these works agree that we all need to put aside our cultural differences and transcend our personal, socioeconomic circumstances to work together to save the environment. Taken together, these works of climate fiction model various ways in which a deep ecological solidarity might be achieved across a broad ideological and cultural spectrum.
Handbook of Climate Change Communication by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9783319704784Publication Date: 2018This comprehensive handbook provides a unique overview of the theory, methodologies and best practices in climate change communication from around the world. It fosters the exchange of information, ideas and experience gained in the execution of successful projects and initiatives, and discusses novel methodological approaches aimed at promoting a better understanding of climate change adaptation. Addressing a gap in the literature on climate change communication and pursuing an integrated approach, the handbook documents and disseminates the wealth of experience currently available in this field. Volume 3 of the handbook provides case studies from around the world, documenting and disseminating the wealth of experiences available.
Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition by Call Number: Print - Clemons - BT746 .H63 2008ISBN: 9780252032134Publication Date: 2008Analysis of animals in the history of the Christian tradition has been exclusively symbolic, but Laura Hobgood-Oster utilizes the feminist perspective in her examination of the impact of animal presence. In challenging the metaphoric reading of animals that reinforces human superiority and dominance, Holy Dogs and Asses underscores animal agency. Creatures play various active roles, which Hobgood-Oster categorizes as exemplars of piety, sources of revelation, saintly martyrs, and the primary other in an intimate relationship. Drawing from rich oral histories, legends, artwork, and popular stories of saints, this study directs our attention to the animal body--also a central concern of Christian theology and feminist criticism. Hobgood-Oster invites the reader to venture beyond the exclusive symbolic nature of animals in the Christian tradition to an awareness that we can know ourselves more fully by reference to the animal.
Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780812220889Publication Date: 2009The human mind needs monsters. In every culture and in every epoch in human history, from ancient Egypt to modern Hollywood, imaginary beings have haunted dreams and fantasies, provoking in young and old shivers of delight, thrills of terror, and endless fascination. All known folklores brim with visions of looming and ferocious monsters, often in the role as adversaries to great heroes. But while heroes have been closely studied by mythologists, monsters have been neglected, even though they are equally important as pan-human symbols and reveal similar insights into ways the mind works. In Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, anthropologist David D. Gilmore explores what human traits monsters represent and why they are so ubiquitous in people's imaginations and share so many features across different cultures. Using colorful and absorbing evidence from virtually all times and places, Monsters is the first attempt by an anthropologist to delve into the mysterious, frightful abyss of mythical beasts and to interpret their role in the psyche and in society.
Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9781317666165Publication Date: 2015This second edition of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, a book foundational for its field, has been updated to consider recent developments in the area such as environmental humanities and animal studies. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine transverse relations between humans, animals and the environment across a wide range of postcolonial literary texts and also address key issues such as global warming, food security, human over-population in the context of animal extinction, queer ecology, and the connections between postcolonial and disability theory. Considering the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at: Narratives of development in postcolonial writing Entitlement, belonging and the pastoral Colonial 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission The politics of eating and the representation of cannibalism Animality and spirituality Sentimentality and anthropomorphism The changing place of humans and animals in a 'posthuman' world.
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780253222039Publication Date: 2010Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.
The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief by Call Number: EBook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780367635152Publication Date: 2023The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief offers a fresh reevaluation of the relationship between fiction and belief, surveying key debates and perspectives from a range of disciplines including narrative and cultural studies, science, religion, and politics.
Science Fiction and Climate Change by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9781789621723Publication Date: 2020Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change skepticism amongst Anglophone conservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near-consensus amongst climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. The resultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-cultural phenomenon and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fiction occupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed 'cli-fi'. It does not, however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmann adopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analysing print and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especially Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. Inspired by Williams's cultural materialism, Bourdieu's sociology of culture and Moretti's version of world systems theory, the book builds on Milner's own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive study in the sociology of literature.
Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction by Call Number: Ebook - Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781781384541Publication Date: 2016This book explores the emergence and development of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009). Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth--geoengineering--has begun to receive serious consideration as a way to address the effects of climate change. This book asks how science fiction has imagined the ways we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society, and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in stories by such writers as H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon in the UK; American pulp science fiction by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke; the countercultural novels of Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ernest Callenbach; Pamela Sargent's Venus trilogy; Frederick Turner's epic poem of terraforming, Genesis; and Kim Stanley Robinson's acclaimed Mars trilogy. It explores terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, the politics of colonisation and habitation, tradition, and memory. This book shows how contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change are influenced by science fiction, and how terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and many other readers a motif to aid in thinking in complex ways about the human impact on planetary environments. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by its world.
