Who We Are

About LitENV

LitENV is a reference platform on ecocriticism, environmental humanities and world literature that was inspired by the teaching of the University Scholars Programme’s module USE2324: Gender and Ecology in Asia. It has been developed using the USP incentive fund. The site houses research materials, scholarly articles, and pedagogical resources on environment, non-human nature and literature.

Our Team

LitENV is managed by a group of scholars working in various areas of its associated fields. We regularly update the site with new content that’s frequently in dialogue with our own ongoing research. Find out more about our background and research interests.

New Directions for World Literature

World Literature and Ecocriticism – New Directions

“World Literature” in, or translated into, English today, comprises a wide body of popular and critically acclaimed literature. The visibility of this contemporary mode of literature expands across readerships, conjoining regions and countries of Europe and the Anglosphere in North America and the UK, to the global south (Anglophone Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands). With student, faculty and community participation, this website will collate literature, recent criticism, as well as the work of artists to explore how contemporary writers and cultural producers from these regions represent environmental experience in order to depict and narrate ‘place’, or a sense of worldly location. In the approach to World Literature provided by this forum, processes of ‘worlding’ emerge through narratives, 

Environmental Humanities in SEA

The aim of all these works has been to acknowledge the idea of not only geographical contiguity with its attendant risks brought on by ‘Second Modernity’ as Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist of Risk Society, labels it, but also cultural commonalities that are shared despite the distinctive cultures and histories unique to each country within the collective. The idea that gets foregrounded is ‘dwelling’, that Greg Garrard terms the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death. 

Affiliations

LitENV is associated with other institutions within Southeast Asia dedicated to environmental humanities scholarship. Together with these organisations, we aim to provide a robust scholarly infrastructure for research at various levels within this academic domain. Find out more about our professional affiliations and the research opportunities they provide.