About Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks
The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk has become the go-to resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each episode features an author discussing their new book (within the last two years) in the broad field of environmental humanities, which includes environmental history, philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, and more. The author introduces the book and then the hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen have a conversation with the author about the book. Live audience members are also invited to ask their own questions. Live talks are sometimes streamed with video, so some speakers may reference things that the audience saw visually during the talk. The talks are organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Literature scholar Hannah Klaubert discussed her book Narrating Nuclear Disaster: Literary Form after Chornobyl and Fukushima (Bloomsbury, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with host Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 28 September 2026.
In a field that remains scientifically contested and, in the current moment of climate breakdown, highly politicized, Narrating Nuclear Disasters offers literature as an arena for exploring the uncertainty arising from events whose short- and long-term effects remain hard to oversee. By reading a wide corpus of post-Chornobyl and post-Fukushima literature from canonical texts by Christa Wolf, Julian Barnes and Ruth Ozeki to genre fiction such as thrillers and travelogues, the book offers a new way of thinking about nuclear narratives and nuclear culture more broadly. In doing so, it positions nuclear disaster narratives within a wider context of “Anthropocene literature”, forging new connections between nuclear culture and contemporary ecocriticism.
14 Sept 2026
Miriam Tola – Resurgent Commons
Miriam Tola, Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at John Cabot University (Italy), discussed her book Resurgent Commons: Feminist Political Ecologies in the European South (Fordham University Press, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with hosts Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 14 September 2026.
Once dismissed as “tragedy,” the commons have been making a comeback. Amid intensifying social and environmental injustices in neoliberal regimes, scholars and activists have turned to the commons—historically, the shared ownership of land—as a way to express more just ways of living within and against the grasp of capitalism. Resurgent Commons reframes the commons by foregrounding relations of care and socio-ecological reproduction, while questioning anthropocentric formulations that would render the commons a set of available resources and the product of human cooperation. Interdisciplinary in nature, Tola’s book troubles universalist accounts of the commons by unearthing its ambivalent role in European colonial histories marked by racial and sexual violence and environmental destruction.
As central case studies, the book considers contemporary political projects that enact feminist, anti-racist and more-than-human practices of urban commoning in Rome, a sprawling built environment in the European South that is also a city of ruins. From transfeminist commons to struggles for repairing areas where industrial ruins and recalcitrant natures coexist, to encounters with indigenous perspectives from the Americas, resurgent commons enact forms of life that are at odds with dominant regimes of property and governance. The book shows how a reconsideration of a supposedly obsolete mode of shared ownership can enable new modes of inhabiting the earth.
7 Sept 2026
Christos Lynteris – How Plague Got Rats
Christos Lynteris, Professor of medical anthropology at the University of St Andrews (UK), discussed his book How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series with hosts Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen on Monday, 7 September 2026.
Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats, Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century.
This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning.
This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease.
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