Applications are now open for the 2024 Warwick-Hopkins Doctoral Summer School, which will take place in Venice, Italy, from June 3-12. This year’s theme is “Renaissance Europe and the Environmental Humanities: Venice and Beyond”. Applications close Friday, March 8th at 5pm GMT (12 noon EST).
All students currently enrolled in a doctoral program in the humanities are eligible to apply, but priority will be given to Warwick and Johns Hopkins students. Fifteen (15) places will be available in total.
To apply, please use the form below to provide a short description of your research interests (400-500 words) and how the program’s focus on the early modern Environmental Humanities will benefit your professional development. You may wish to prepare this in a word processor and then copy/paste into the form: https://forms.office.com/e/Cg5sqt4mj3
This form will close on Friday March 8th at 5pm GMT. No applications after this time will be considered. Decisions will be emailed to applicants in mid-March.
Costs:
All participants selected to join the Summer School will pay a registration fee of £320 GBP / $400 USD. Lodging in Venice (in twin rooms) will be covered for all participants, and students from Warwick and JHU will also have their travel costs covered. Participants will have to pay for their meals, entry to museums, and local travel in Italy (other than program-related travel). The program is supported by generous funding from the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Warwick and the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, with the generous collaboration of the Istituto Veneto and the programme in Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at the Università Ca’ Foscari.
Additional Information:
The Warwick-JHU Summer School, in association with the University of Ca’ Foscari, will be an extended interdisciplinary workshop in History of Art, History of Science and Medicine, Literature and History of the Book, with an emphasis on how literature, art, religion, urban planning, and forms of knowledge culture, religion, and politics were shaped by the constant threats of flood, land degradation, epidemic disease, resource depletion, and overpopulation, and shaped cultural responses and understandings of these crises in turn. The Republic’s artistic and intellectual prominence, its stylized urban design, its geopolitical impact on the mainland and the Mediterranean, will be seen through the lens of its successes and failures in managing the natural world. We will consider the implications for the humanities of work in ecocriticism and in environmental history to carve out new ways of attending to pre-modern Europe, and thinking together about how we can develop new ways to listen and to look for the enmeshed and multifaceted relationship between pre-modern culture and its multiple ecologies. We will also think about how ecocriticism and environmental history in the pre-modern period can inform our culture today, with the conviction that the humanities play just as vital a role as STEM in addressing our current juncture of climate crisis.
Site visits will provisionally include Torcello, the Lazaretto Nuovo ecomuseum and Barene walk, Bassano del’Grappa, Fratta del polesine (Villa Badoer and Villa Grimani Molin), Arquà Petrarca, and Sant’Erasmo ecological farm.
Participating faculty will include: Bryan Brazeau, University of Warwick; Donatella Calabi, Università Iuav di Venezia; Stephen J. Campbell, Johns Hopkins University; Ingrid de Smet, Warwick University; Meital Shai Guseo, Ca’Foscari; April Oettinger, Goucher University; James Pilgrim, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Larry Principe, Johns Hopkins University; Arielle Saiber, Johns Hopkins University.