Meet the new Director of the EHL - Robert Gioielli

I have […] always been convinced of the scholarly value of the environmental humanities, but my recent motivation comes from more urgent and practical questions around climate change, environmental injustice and similar challenges. Social and cultural questions need to be at the center of our efforts to address these issues. But through teaching, working on community engagement projects and trying to communicate research to the broader public, I have seen how many students and non-academics still don't understand the important connections between the social and the material, or the cultural and the ecological.

Hi Robert, and welcome to us. Tell us a bit more about your background!

I grew up in the United States, mostly in Cincinnati, Ohio which is in the Midwest, but I also spent a number of years in the South, specifically in South Carolina. For the past decade I have been a professor at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, a teaching focused college within the larger university. I taught a broad number of core courses in environmental history and the humanities, conducted research in environmental and urban history, and was involved in a number of community projects. I was also the director of the college's honors program, which helped our top students develop experiential learning opportunities.

Before I was a professor, I worked as a journalist at a small, community based daily newspaper. That experience of working to help regular people understand and take action on complex issues has always shaped my approach to teaching, research and scholarly work.

How would you describe your research interests and focus?

I am an urban and environmental historian, with a specific interest in how social structures and systems create and shape local, regional and global ecologies and environmental systems, and vice versa. My first major project was on environmental activism in American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, examining the experiences of communities facing significant environmental inequalities, an early iteration of environmental justice activism. My current manuscript project is an environmental and social history of American suburban sprawl since the 1970s. Anyone who travels to the United States experiences the reality that outside of a few major cities, Americans get around almost exclusively by car, and live in single-family homes in suburban areas. This is a tremendously resource and energy intensive system that is also a key driver of social and environmental inequality. The project, tentatively titled "An Environmental History of White Flight," looks to understand the social and environmental causes and consequences of this form of city-building. 

My other primary research stream is on the structures and systems of environmental politics and activism, and how we define environmentalism historically and contemporarily. This has involved numerous writings on environmental justice and urban activism, and a current project on the role of philanthropy in shaping the creation and operation of major environmental organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy.

Finally, I have recently developed a significant interest in how we conceptualize, structure and execute interdisciplinary research projects. True interdisciplinarity, especially across fields like the natural sciences and humanities, is quite challenging, but can also be tremendously rewarding and insightful. 

What motivates you to work with environmental humanities, and how did you come to find the interest to start with?

I was always interested in environmental issues, but when I was at university and in my first career, they were usually discussed through the framework of the natural sciences or technological systems. I initially went to graduate school to study urban history, but early in my first year, I discovered the field of environmental history. This became a "eureka" moment. Now I had a framework to try and understand the various environmental issues, conflicts and relationships I had been interested in from a historical perspective. Environmental history takes the non-human world seriously, as an actor and independent force, and this was revelatory, revealing a host of opportunities for analysis.

I have thus always been convinced of the scholarly value of the environmental humanities, but my recent motivation comes from more urgent and practical questions around climate change, environmental injustice and similar challenges. Social and cultural questions need to be at the center of our efforts to address these issues. But through teaching, working on community engagement projects and trying to communicate research to the broader public, I have seen how many students and non-academics still don't understand the important connections between the social and the material, or the cultural and the ecological. 

What do you see as one of the most important questions for the environmental humanities today?

Over the past decade, the environmental humanities has gone from a loose collection of concepts and texts to a thriving, full-fledged field with conferences, journals, professors and all of the trappings of academic legitimacy. The field's growth has been quite staggering, to be honest. One of the reasons for that growth, and the overall strength of the field, has been a resolute openness to different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, especially from core humanities disciplines. But now that the field is established, can the often radical spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration that marks the best of environmental humanities scholarship be maintained? Or through the process of field-building and legitimization, does environmental humanities become its own siloed discipline? 

I think this is especially important as we consider connecting with our colleagues in engineering, the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences. which leads to a second question: What's the impact of the environmental humanities, outside of the research journal or seminar room? To fulfill the promise of the field - that humanities approaches should be at the center of trying to understand and address our most pressing social and environmental challenges - we need to work not only on communication with the broader public, but with other academic disciplines. This is one of the reasons I am so excited about working in this division and at KTH. As environmental humanists, we need to educate and collaborate closely with current and future engineers, architects, and computer scientists. 

And as a last question and to wrap this up, do you have any thought-provoking piece of the environmental humanities in culture that you can recommend?

One of my current favorites is Stop Saving the Planet by Jenny Price . It's a fun and sharp critique of lots of trends in environmentalist practice and policy, especially related to green consumerism. It was written for a broader audience, but is structured around deep engagement with core concepts in environmental history and humanities, making it a great example of how to do public scholarship.