Environment and Power

Robyn d’Avignon, Associate Professor, Department of History, FAS
Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, FAS
Dean Chahim, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, FAS

The Environment and Power working group brings together faculty and graduate students to engage with cutting-edge humanistic scholarship and works-in-progress exploring the intersection of political power and the environment. Rooted in ethnographic, oral historical, and archival research, the group’s interdisciplinary work spans history, anthropology, and the environmental humanities.

The group has three primary goals: to foster a multidisciplinary network of scholars, to develop a co-taught lecture course for the CORE curriculum, and to create an intellectual home for those contributing to NYU’s environmental humanities minor. With expertise in Senegal, Mexico, and China, the co-directors bring diverse regional and disciplinary perspectives. With a rotating leadership structure that ensures continuity and sustained engagement with NYU’s scholarly community and New York City’s unique environmental history, the group is committed to building a dynamic intellectual community at NYU and beyond.

Unveiling the Human Dimensions of Conservation: Book and Paper Conservation 

Lisa Conte, Conservation Center Co-Chairs, IFA
Lindsey Tyne, Barbara Goldsmith Preservation & Conservation Department, NYU Libraries

The work of this working group proposes to expand the historical narrative of book and paper conservation by conducting and
analyzing oral history interviews with established professionals, allied experts, and practitioners without formal
training. Addressing a significant gap in existing archival resources, the project will document the evolution of
conservation practices, techniques, and theories, emphasizing the field’s humanistic dimensions. Through
interdisciplinary collaboration between NYU faculty, graduate students, and a network of national volunteers, the
group will develop an Oral History Field Guide, conduct and publish ten interviews, and create a publicly
accessible digital research resource. By integrating methodologies from oral history, archival studies, digital
humanities, and conservation, this project will not only preserve valuable historical perspectives but will also foster
a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and ethical influences shaping the preservation of cultural heritage.
The Working Group will culminate in a publication reflecting on the project’s methodology and findings, and lay the
groundwork for future expansion, including increased interview collection and curricular development.

Rethinking Materialism: Experimental Methods in Critical Humanities

Sybil Cooksey, Clinical Assistant Professor, Gallatin
Fanny Gribenski, Assistant Professor of Music, FAS
Whit Pow, Assistant Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication, Steinhardt

Nearly twenty years ago, theorists of what is now dubbed “the material turn” sought to break the binaries between subjects and objects; nature and culture; “humans” and “things” that often structured modern inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In the decades since, these critics have in turn been taken to task by others who suggest the not-so-newness of “new” materialism, pointing to its unacknowledged debt to Black and Indigenous thought, its ignorance of pre-existing racial onto-epistemologies, and its tendency to altogether avoid questions of sexuality, power relations, and the critique of ongoing forms of coloniality. This working group situates its study at this intersection between materialism and its discontents, aiming to think critically about archives and collections, archaeologies and technologies of documentation, and ever-shifting categories of “humans” and “things.” Focusing on the work of Black, Indigenous, eco-Marxist, feminist, queer, and transgender scholars whose work provides us with experimental models for working with and against materialism, we seek to bring these insights to bear on our approaches to research. In what concrete ways must we shift how we formulate research questions, talk about our objects of study and go about writing our books? How can we bring an ethics of care, accountability, and obligation into the ways we articulate and enact material-human relations in our work?