In the latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, a new website makes curricular materials for teaching about New Haven’s environmental history more accessible; a new essay collection honors the literary oeuvre of Yale scholar Peter Brooks; Yale School of Architecture students help Maine coastal communities envision a more resilient future; and an assistant professor of classics and history wins a prestigious book award.
For more, please visit an archive of all arts and humanties coverage at Yale News.
Curating New Haven’s environmental history
A new website launched by Yale Environmental Humanities offers free access to a collection of historical materials related to the environmental history of New Haven.
Called New Haven Environmental History, the site includes a mix of photos, maps, graphs, newspaper clippings, illustrations, advertisements, and reports. The materials can be perused in the site’s “library,” or located within themed topic areas: transport, animals, water, historical maps, parks and open space, public health, land use and planning, energy, and food and agriculture.
“The spirit behind this project is to make it easier for more of us to be able to teach about New Haven’s environmental history in all of our classrooms and, as learners about the city, to be able to find these things more easily and put them into digestible form so they can be easily consumed and used,” said Paul Sabin, the project lead and coordinator of the environmental humanities program, at a March 5 launch event attended by Yale faculty, students, local schoolteachers, and other community members.
Urban environmental history is about the relationship between people and nature, “the ideas that humans have about the natural world, the ways they try to manifest those ideas on the landscape, and the dynamic natural forces that shape and constrain human options,” he said.
Among the many items of interest on the site are a 1748 map of the nine-square grid at the center of New Haven’s colonial settlement, an advertisement, circa 1880, for a local cultivator of oysters, and a health survey of city residents from 1917.
Sabin, the Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History and professor of American Studies in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), said the collection includes materials he has gathered over the years for use in his environmental history courses, as well as items unearthed from various archives by his students, and content supplied by the project’s other faculty collaborators: Amity Doolittle, a senior lecturer II at the Yale School of the Environment, and Elihu Rubin, the Henry Hart Rice Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Yale School of Architecture.
The site has drawn on materials from the New Haven Museum, Yale libraries, and other Connecticut libraries and archives. The student research team has been supported by an Impact! Award from Yale Planetary Solutions and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Sabin emphasized that the site is meant to be collaborative and invited others to get involved in finding and sharing additional historic materials.
The site also includes free resources for teachers, including suggestions for student activities and a research guide. Sabin said curricular materials, such as worksheets and slideshows, are in the works.
The site’s tagline — “Imagining a City’s Future by Studying Its Past” — is meant to suggest, he said, that “by thinking about how the city has evolved and changed over all these years, we can come up with ideas to imagine what the future might look like.”
‘Reading with Peter Brooks’
For over sixty years, the writing of Yale scholar Peter Brooks has illuminated the force of narrative, through literary theory and history, psychoanalysis, and law. This wide-ranging influence is reflected in a recent collection of essays, “Reading with Peter Brooks,” edited by Rachel Bowlby (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), that captures the ways in which Brooks’ intellectual force continues to shape the thinking of his students, colleagues, and readers.
In the collection, which originated in a 2023 symposium organized by Yale professors Alice Kaplan and Maurice Samuels, 18 scholars examine the interdisciplinary impact that Brooks, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, has had on the humanities.
“Anyone who is interested in the complexity of stories must turn first and foremost to the work of Peter Brooks,” writes Juliet Mitchell, professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge and University College London, in one essay. “Peter’s work is never static…Indeed, alive thinking rather than finished thought is the hallmark of Peter’s way of being.”
Brooks’ books have included literary analyses of Freud, a pair of novels, close studies of James, Balzac, and Flaubert, and examinations of the use of narrative and confession in legal settings. (His most recent book, “Seduced by Story,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in 2022.) Aptly, many of the essayists focus on the centrality of reading in his oeuvre, and his skill at pulling apart and weaving back together the complex ideas within the texts he studies —bringing to bear upon them, as one essayist puts it, his “imaginative intelligence.”
Brooks also contributes two essays to this collection. One, about his experience with teaching at a prison in 2018, first appeared in the Yale Review in 2019; in a postscript, Brooks notes that it is an account of “an overwhelming new experience of teaching, one that left me with a confirmation of the importance of the teaching enterprise along with an unshakeable sense of sadness at the fact of mass incarceration in the U.S.”
As he writes in the second essay, in which he reflects on his intellectual career at Yale and elsewhere, teaching and critical analysis have always been intertwined in his work, as “all my so-called scholarly work has really been an attempt to put into orderly form ideas generated in the classroom.”
He ends by underscoring the importance of the cross-disciplinary work captured in this collection, and the ways in which the study of literature and language is enriched by other disciplines — and, in turn, enriches them. The humanities, he writes, “can be, should be, an export commodity.”
Designs for coastal climate resiliency
An abstract vision of Portland’s future, with mixed-use streetscapes, green pathways and a robust ferry system.
The Maine coastal communities of Portland, South Portland, and the Casco Bay region are in a race against time to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The Gulf of Maine is warming at least three times faster than the global ocean average, and the state’s sea levels are rising at a similarly alarming rate.
Last semester, Yale School of Architecture students worked with community stakeholders in those cities to help brainstorm ways to increase their resiliency as part of an initiative known as the Envision Resilience Challenge. Yale was one of eight universities that participated in the semester-long challenge; the architectural and landscape designs that resulted were recently on display at the Portland Public Library.
The Envision initiative, originally developed by Remain, a philanthropic organization based on Nantucket, brings university students together with coastal communities to research and develop creative ways to adapt to climate change.
The dozen Yale students who participated in this year’s challenge were enrolled in a seminar focused on coastal resilience and adaptation led by Alan Plattus, a professor of architecture at the Yale School of Architecture and the director of the Yale Urban Design Workshop and Center for Urban Design Research. They participated in a program of Zoom lectures and discussions and, in October, visited the sites in Maine and met with local officials and experts.
The students were divided into three teams, each of which was focused on creating a conceptual design strategy for various climate challenges in relation to specific sites in the region — Portland city proper; the Portland waterfront; and the South Portland working waterfront. Their proposals offered, respectively, a linked series of landscapes to help manage storm water and sea-level rise; a remaking of a major ferry terminal to be more resilient and ambitious in its reach; and a visualization of the gradual long-term impact of a transition to clean energy on a waterfront now dominated by petroleum tank farms.
“Together, these explorations projected a framework for a process of locally grounded and community-engaged adaptation to climate change that builds on and strengthens the historic and contemporary character and culture of Portland and the New England coast,” Plattus said. “Students had the opportunity to engage with a local community and place, and to use their design intelligence and skills not only to address the challenges they face but, importantly, to visualize alternative futures.”
Award honors book about ancient curses
Jessica Lamont, assistant professor of classics and history in Yale’s FAS, is the 2025 recipient of the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Book Award for her book “In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece” (Oxford University Press, 2023).
In announcing the award, the AIA said Lamont’s book “is the first synthetic study of curse tablets in the ancient Greek world.” Curse tablets, typically thin pieces of lead, were inscribed with maledictions aimed at the curser’s opponents or competitors. They were deposited in what were thought to be conduits to the underworld, such as wells, cisterns and graves, and many have been recovered for study.
“Using case studies, Lamont pulls together threads of internal and external evidence to weave the personal stories of the lives of individuals living at a particular time and place,” the AIA said. “Ultimately, Lamont synthesizes the threads in an effective and accessible manner, showing how the highly specialized scholarly field of curse tablets can illuminate many facets of life (and death) across the wider ancient world.”
Lamont is also director of undergraduate studies in classics and a member of Yale’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine.
In 2024, Lamont spoke with Yale News about a curse tablet held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library that she uses in her classical antiquity classes. Acquired in 2019, the tablet dates to circa 450 BCE.
