Just Nature is a multi-week teaching module that draws from Renaissance culture and the contemporary environmental humanities to provide historical frameworks and interdisciplinary approaches for understanding the climate crisis. Collaboratively developed by Davy Knittle, Carol Mejia-LaPerle, Debapriya Sarkar, Hillary Eklund, Dennis Britton, Kirsten Mendoza, Nathaniel Otjen, and Kathryn Vomero Santos, Just Nature provides students with tools to historicize the climate crisis, critique the colonial logics that underpin environmental expropriation and degradation, and study contemporary issues of climate justice using humanistic methods. Ultimately, this teaching module invites students to think with Shakespeare to consider how they belong—in the classroom, in the community, and in a world that needs their creativity and care.

This project was supported by a Scholarship and Collaboration in Humanities and Arts (SCHARP) Breakthrough Award for the University of Connecticut, a seed grant for projects that chart new directions in scholarly and creative development. In this pilot year, the module was taught on five campuses across public and private institutions in the USA and Canada.