2027
Just Nature: Shakespeare in Philadelphia Symposium
Folger Shakespeare Library
April 22–23, 2027
Organized by Davy Knittle, University of Delaware, this panel will describe the history and design of the Just Nature initiative, including several instructors' experiences with teaching the module. This workshop will invite participants to collaborate with undergraduate students from the University of Delaware in site-specific exercises at the Corinthian Gardens in Philadelphia.
2026
Just Nature: Throughlines Interview and Workshop
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
November 12–13, 2026
Just Nature: Pedagogy Reflection Workshop
May 18, 2026
Participants: Carol Mejia-LaPerle, Wright State University and Davy Knittle, University of Delaware, Dennis Britton, University of British Columbia, Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Trinity University, Kirsten Mendoza, University of Dayton, Nathaniel Otjen, Ramapo College, and Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
Waterways Community Workshop
Mystic Seaport Museum
May 8–9, 2026
Facilitator: Michelle Moon, Saltworks Interpretive Consulting
Participants: Michael Bagley, SoundWaters, Dan Brayton, Middlebury College, Jason Oliver Chang, University of Connecticut, Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College, Elysa Engelman, Mystic Seaport Museum, Akeia de Barros Gomes, Edward W. Kane & Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History, Elizabeth Kaeser, Connecticut River Museum, Kyle Labe, University of Connecticut, Silvermoon Mars LaRose, Tomaquag Museum, Jason Mancini, CT Humanities, Steve Mentz, St. John's University, Valeria Ochoa, University of Connecticut, Maria Petrillo, Mystic Seaport Museum, Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut, Ned Schaumberg, Williams College, Jen Shook, Grinnell College, Maisa Tisdale, Mary & Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community, Thomas Thurston, Yale University, and Sophia Zepeda, Williams College
Led by Michelle Moon, this workshop fostered community-driven and historically informed initiatives on climate justice, centered on bodies of water and the lives they connect and sustain. By bringing together scholars, artists, teachers, tribal leaders, and community leaders, this workshop aimed to empower individuals and community organizations with new connections to help build resilient models and expand their work in historically aware, collectively oriented, and water-centered ways. Through the connections and partnerships built, participants imagined new forms of world-building that redress the ongoing racial and environmental justices of the past.
Connecticut River Valley Environmental Summit
Wesleyan University
May 2, 2026
Presenters: Kyle Labe, University of Connecticut, and Alyse Sweeney, University of Connecticut
The second annual Connecticut River Valley Environmental Summit brought together scientists, policymakers, academics, cultural institutions, and more to serve as a platform for community members to forge new connections and explore opportunities for collaboration and coalition-building to keep Connecticut waterways healthy and safe for future generations.
Symposium: Environmental and Racial Justice in Shakespeare Studies
The Columbia Shakespeare Seminar at Columbia University
April 24, 2026
Organizers: Steve Mentz, St. John's University, Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut, and Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College
This symposium brought together scholars and artists to consider the intersections of racial, social, and environmental justice in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The interlinked racial and environmental crises of our time seem to compound faster than mitigating efforts, let alone the human imagination, can keep up. But the reparative work they demand requires a deep investigation of the early modern past. As the imaginative literature from this period demonstrates, premodern ideas about racial difference were inseparable from questions of geographical distance, understandings about "nature," and the complexity of the more-than-human world more broadly. By bringing together scholars and artists who have been considering questions of radicalization and environmental issues in early modernity, this symposium encouraged participants to envision new methods and practices that enable us to engage ethically with the complex entanglements of racial and environmental injustice in Shakespeare's world and ours.
2025
Panel: Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative "Teaching Race and Place with Spenser"
The International Spenser Society
December 9, 2025
Organizers: Dennis Britton, University of British Columbia and Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College
As Spenser writes characters in and out of diverse locales, he meditates on matters of embodiment, questions of identity, the play of social and ‘natural’ hierarchies, and the effects of geography on individual and collective bodies. How might we engage students in discussing these topics? And what possibilities might such conversations hold for collaborative knowledge creation, place-based learning and action?
This IPI panel featured Zainab Cheema (Florida Gulf Coast University), Eli Cumings (Columbia University), Claire Eager (The College of Wooster), and Justin Shaw (Clark University), who discussed approaches to content, contexts, and methods for teaching race and place with Spenser.
Workshop: The Sea Voyage by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger
The Private Theatre's Early Modern Collab
October 4 and October 5, 2025 at the Manhattan Theatre Club
Actors: Annabel Capper and John Douglas Thompson
Organizers: Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College, Musa Gurnis, Private Theatre, and Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
Led by Annabel Capper and John Douglas Thompson, this masterclass provided scholars, students, and members of the public with a unique opportunity to observe professional actors as they explored scenes from The Sea Voyage. The workshop emphasized world building and group dynamics within this underperformed response to Shakespeare’s Tempest.
Participants were invited to reflect on how the play’s wet spaces—including shores, lakes, rivers, and fens—act as a proving ground for different visions of mastery in a world increasingly defined by its watery expanses. The workshop prompted questions about effectively representing the dynamic qualities of waterways—such as shores, seas, wetlands, and rivers—on stage. It also encouraged consideration of how theatrical staging can illuminate water’s role in mediating relationships between humans and more-than-human environments, resources, and objects, as well as its influence on relations of gender, nationality, and race.
Seminar: Race and Place in Shakespeare and Spenser
Shakespeare Association of America
Dennis A. Britton, University of British Columbia
Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College
How might placing Spenser and Shakespeare in conversation extend ongoing conversations in premodern critical race studies, ecocriticism, and social justice? This seminar invited papers that examine how Spenser and/or Shakespeare figure racial and natural hierarchies, and how they use place to sort people based on superficial markings and other real or imagined characteristics. Can putting these poets in dialogue create new avenues for situated knowledge, mutual care, and ethical habitation?
Workshop: Environmental Justice Pedagogy
Humanities Institute, University of Connecticut
Co-conveners: Carol Mejia-LaPerle, Wright State University and Davy Knittle, University of Delaware
Participants: Dennis Britton, University of British Columbia, Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Trinity College, Kirsten Mendoza, University of Dayton, Nathaniel Otjen, Ramapo College, and Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
The workshop gathered scholar-teachers—both early modernists and scholars working on contemporary environmental humanities—with the aim of developing a teaching module that uses early modern texts to frame approaches to environmental justice. This module would be suitable for a variety of classroom contexts, from writing to Shakespeare to literature & environment. The participants will teach it during AY25-26 then reconvene in a virtual seminar to discuss their experiences. In addition to producing a flexible and portable teaching unit, we hope the collaborative approach to teaching across institutions can serve as a model.
2024
Workshop: Race, Place, and the Nonhuman in Early Modernity
Folger Shakespeare Library
Hillary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans
Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
This workshop gathered together scholars, teachers, artists, and activists to explore and interrupt the legacies of early modern racial and environmental injustice. Through sessions on community engagement, public humanities, scholarship, and the arts, participants discussed different strategies for bringing the environmental humanities into conversation with work on race and empire.
2022
Seminar: Early Modern Ecocriticism and Critical Race Studies
Shakespeare Association of America
Hillary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans
Jennifer Park, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University
This seminar convened scholars working at the intersection of early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies to address the following questions: How might studies of early modern literature attend to our presentist concerns? How can research on environmental catastrophes, refugia, or natural resources expand studies of colonization and empire? How might studies of race and gender foster an intersectional ecofeminism? How might we better explore the entanglements of racial, social, and environmental injustice?
2021
Shakespeare Futures Panel: Critical Futures of Early Modern Eco-Studies and Race Studies
Becoming Undisciplined: A Venture in Collaborative Criticism
Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut
Jennifer Park, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Hillary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans
Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University
For this panel, the four of us co-wrote and co-presented a single paper. Our project aimed to put premodern critical race studies (PCRS) and environmental humanities into a more direct dialogue. Our early conversations, however, revealed how our individual critical perspectives limited our approaches. As we shared and discussed readings, we were inspired to challenge traditional protocols and products of scholarly labor and the persistently individualized patterns of inquiry in the humanities.
We later published this work as the article, “Becoming Undisciplined: On Pathways to Racial and Environmental Justice in Early Modern Literary Studies” (PMLA 2024), which demonstrates how putting questions of environmental and racial justice into more direct conversation in early modern studies both requires and yields new approaches to our disciplinary assumptions, research practices, and even our own scholarly voices.
