Courses

This course examines intersections between religion and climate through the lens of
colonialism. In recent years, scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences
have suggested that the climate crisis dates to the advent of European colonialism in the 16th and
17th centuries. This literature argues that colonial projects involved the remaking of landscapes via
“terraforming,” seeking to inscribe European imaginaries on the land and extract value from it,
while violently suppressing and destroying local and Indigenous lifeworlds. At the same time, a
longstanding body of literature has investigated the relationship between colonialism and religion,
focusing on missionary efforts to remake religious subjects and subjectivities and draw boundaries
between true religion and its opposites, “paganism” and “superstition.” This course seeks to
understand these two processes within the same frame, examining how colonial projects entailed
simultaneous efforts to subjugate, extract value from, and transform people and landscapes. By the
end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of climate,
religion, and colonialism, and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis.