In February 2022, I was recruited to the University of Cologne as Germany’s first Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Environmental Humanities. Humboldt Professorships are permanent posts enabling the establishment of new research teams in designated areas of excellence under the leadership of an eminent scholar appointed from abroad. Thanks to the generous funding of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (EUR 3.5 million for five years), together with ongoing support from the University of Cologne, I have established a thriving research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH).
MESH is also a product of Australian leadership in the creation of a novel research field, now known as the Environmental Humanities, addressing the social, cultural and ethical dimensions of global environmental change, together with its associated ecological, climate and health crises. Bringing the historical, philosophical, literary, linguistic and cultural anthropological expertise of the humanities into conversation with the natural and social sciences, MESH fosters research and knowledge exchange across three main areas of enquiry: decolonial cultural ecologies; multi-species conviviality; and disaster preparedness.
The Hub has a core staff of two professors, an academic programme manager, three doctoral researchers (in environmental education, environmental anthropology, and interdisciplinary disaster studies, respectively). One postdoctoral researcher (in environmental linguistics), several research assistants and — given the weight of German academic bureaucracy — an invaluable secretary. My own expertise in environmental literary, cultural-historical and religious studies is complemented in the hub by that of MESH Co-Director Franz Krause from environmental anthropology, whilst a third Co-Director, Roman Bartosch comes from the field of education.
International collaboration
MESH quickly became a magnet for other researchers from around the world, including the Philippines, India, Nigeria, South Africa, the USA, Brazil, Norway, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Australia. In addition to a succession of short-stay junior and senior fellows, we currently have seven further PhDs and three postdocs, funded either by individual scholarships or through collaborative grants. These include:
- “Eco-critical literacy in music- and literature-related practices of cultural education”, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and co-led by Roman Bartosch, and
- “Cultural Evolution in Changing Climate: Human and Earth System Coupled Research”, a Profile-building project funded by the State Ministry of Education and Research, of which I am co-speaker.
Our most ambitious collaboration to date has been with the University of Cologne’s highly regarded Global South Studies Center, with whom we developed a proposal for a seven-year (+) German Research Council-funded Cluster of Excellence. With twenty-five Principal Investigators from seven countries and eleven institutions, this proposed research programme, Sharing a Planet in Peril (SAPP), examines how the inequitable impacts of global environmental change are being experienced, narrativised and responded to by diverse communities around the world, in particular but not exclusively, in the Global South.
Whilst we got through to the final round of the evaluation process last year, we just missed out on this occasion, so we are now pursuing other grants to carry this project forward in different ways.
In the meantime, we are continuing with one of the initiatives associated with SAPP, a Thematic Hub for Planetary Wellbeing, one of the BRIDGES networks of humanities-led sustainability research hubs affiliated with UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations programme.
Collaborations with Australia
For me personally, the creation of MESH has been the culmination of a journey that I embarked on some twenty-five years ago as a founding member of Australia’s National Working Group in the Ecological Humanities.
Instigated by AAH Fellow Libby Robin and ASSA Fellow, the late Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018), and including, among others, AAH Fellows Tom Griffiths and Freya Mathews, this collaboration, which led to the founding in 2012 of the peak journal in the field, Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press), is now regarded as one of the birthplaces of the environmental humanities worldwide.
As noted in an AAH blog from October 2021, Articulating the great environmental challenges, Australian researchers have figured prominently in the development of this inter- and transdisciplinary field, and they continue to do so, not least through the work of a bevy of younger researchers, several of whom, such as Emily O’Gorman, Natasha Fijn, and AAH Fellow Thom van Dooren undertook their doctoral studies with Working Group members.
It has been a thrill for me to invite all three to speak at the University of Cologne, along with several other Australian writers and researchers, including Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Ackermann, novelist James Bradley, artist Vic McEwan, Aboriginal theologian Anne Pattel-Gray, and ethnographer and AAH Fellow, Stephen Muecke. Thom, moreover, currently holds an Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize at MESH, and we look forward to closer collaboration in the coming years.
MESH is not the only environmental humanities centre in Germany, having been preceded by the long-standing Rachel Carson Center at the University of Munich. The contribution of the arts and humanities to addressing today’s pressing socio-ecological challenges nonetheless remains far less widely appreciated here than in Australia.
For that reason, I was delighted to have received the nerve-wracking honour of presenting the table talk at the 2025 annual dinner of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, held in the august reception rooms of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. Among the invited guests were the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, the State Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space Travel, MPs from the incumbent government (both CDU/CSU and SPD) and from the opposition Green and Left parties. Alongside the assorted parliamentarians, Humboldt Foundation heads, and a sprinkling of other Humboldt professors, were the Presidents and General Secretaries of the German Research Council and the National Academy of the Sciences (Leopoldina); the General Secretaries of the German Academic Exchange Service; Executive Director of the German-American Fulbright Programme; and the General Director of the Mercator Foundation’s Climate Protection Unit. Along with singing the praises of the fabulous Humboldt Foundation, my not unchallenging task was to explain the importance of the environmental humanities whilst garnering some laughs for some ecopolitically-tinged jokes concerning geese: goose references being a requisite component of dinner speeches on the occasion of such seasonal celebrations in Germany, when goose is traditionally on the menu (as it was that evening, despite the ravages of bird flu, alongside a welcome vegetarian option).
Whether or not my efforts will have helped to raise the profile of the environmental humanities in Germany remains to be seen. Notwithstanding the other urgent matters on the political agenda here, and elsewhere, at present, however, ecological and climate crises continue to worsen, and the arts and humanities, in conjunction with the natural and social sciences, remain crucial to their redress.
