Research
Environmental Humanities Initiative
The Environmental Humanities (EH) is a wide field of study that engages with central
and pressing environmental and human dilemmas as well as with issues of food justice
and just sustainability in a time of rapid change. Humanities scholars from different
disciplines are at the forefront of the response to climate change and sustainability
efforts acknowledging the link between environmental degradation and social inequality.
They also strive to find points of contact between the nature-culture separation that
underlies traditional conceptions of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Environmental
Humanities scholarship has emerged in several institutions of higher learning bringing
together scholars, not specifically trained in the natural sciences, but committed
to environmental thinking and practice within and beyond the academy.
The Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI) was founded with the aim of acknowledging
the contribution of the Humanities to the mitigation of the current environmental
crisis within a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective. Given food’s centrality
to culture, history, and the social sciences, the critical study of food together
with issues related to environmental and food justice, agroecology, extractivism,
waste, and the visual communication of just sustainability are an integral part of
the initiative
EHI director is Patrizia La Trecchia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and is Associate Professor and Founding Head of Italian Studies in the Department of World Languages. With a background in cultural studies and film studies, she has maintained a transdisciplinary research agenda blending food studies with political ecologies and environmental humanities.
Dr. La Trecchia authored two textbooks and the monograph  (2013) that was the first study to analyze the city of Naples in a postcolonial and
transnational perspective pioneering new lines of investigations on the city of Naples
and the so-called Southern Question that provided a paradigm to look at all the Souths
of the world for comparative analyses. She is completing one monograph on the politics
of food justice (under contract with Routledge) and another monograph that expands
on her previous work on the South (under contract with Palgrave). Her research, teaching,
and activism aim to bridge the rapidly growing transdisciplinary field of the environmental
humanities with political ecologies of food justice. This approach connects food to
its political and ecological implications acknowledging the colonial dynamics that
reproduce practices of agro-extractivism and injustice within the food system.
She has established international partnerships between the Environmental Humanities
Initiative at USF and the , the , and the interdisciplinary ²Ô. &²Ô²ú²õ±è;
Learning Opportunities
The first course in the Environmental Humanities at the Â鶹ÊÓƵ, , is offered every fall semester. The course uniquely blends food politics and environmental humanities shedding a light on broader structural inequalities through the lens of food justice. The course is ideally followed by , a course on the visual politics of food offered in the spring semester that is one of the very first courses selected to be Global Citizen certified.
In the news
New Environmental Humanities initiative at the University of Soth Florida - College of Arts and Sciences, The Hub, May 2, 2022