Yale Environmental Humanities was launched in 2018 as a platform to highlight and support the emerging interdisciplinary conversation, across departments and schools, about environmental problems and human connections to the natural world.
Today, environmental themes are deeply intertwined with the humanities across a broad range of courses at Yale — including the one featured here. Read an overview and explore other course features.
A dozen students huddled over an illustrated book about animals that was published in France sometime in the 1830s. Their instructor, Ivana Dizdar, a historian of visual and material culture, urged them to look closely at the deep red and blue feathers of the bird shown on the open page, noting that this image, like all in the book, had been hand-painted.
This volume was among a varied collection of French visual materials propped on pillows on a table in the Beinecke Library and assembled in collaboration with curator Shannon K. Supple for this class session.
As the students carefully turned the book’s delicate pages, several commented that the depictions of some animals looked a little strange or, conversely, too perfect. This, Dizdar explained, is because artists of this period were often presenting an “idealized version” of animals.
“This is a turtle,” Dizadar said as the students examined a drawing of a turtle, “but also the idea of a turtle.”
Ivana Dizdar, at far right, and her class at the Beinecke Library.
A postdoc fellow in the History of Art, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dizdar is among a growing group of scholars who are focused on the intersection of art history and animal studies.
“I’m trying to get the students to think of animals not only symbolically but also as historical agents,” she said of the course. “Looking at animals gives us a fuller, more nuanced picture of the history of art, the history of politics, in France, and the history of France’s relationship with the rest of the world.”
In another book, for example, the animals illustrating a fable — a kingly lion towering on its hind legs above various other creatures below — might have been a subtle way to represent different classes of people or different professions, Supple suggested.
Jing Jing Luo, a sophomore, sat down before a book with an oversized page that folded out to reveal a black-and-white illustration of various birds depicted against a seaside backdrop in Greenland.
“I think this setting cannot be real,” she observed, noting that so many species of birds were unlikely to be gathered so closely together.
Indeed, Dizdar agreed, the artist was likely imagining the Greenlandic landscape and collapsing together the preserved dead birds he had seen in a scientific context.
And yet, added Elliot Wessel, a senior, the presentation of the illustration offered an auditory verisimilitude. As the page unfolds, revealing more and more birds, “we can ‘hear’ the flapping of the wings and the bird songs.”
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2 min readContinue ReadingCourses across many departments and schools are deepening conversations about climate, humans, and the natural world.