German/English Lecture. Christina Gerhardt (U. Hawai’i at Mānoa). Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise.

Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, Film and
German Studies at the University of Hawaii and Senior Fellow at the University of California at
Berkeley.

ABSTRACT: In “Let Them Drown,” the 2016 London Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein called attention, as Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor had done, to the nexus of climate change, (colonial) racism and poverty. But she shifted the spotlight onto the oft-overlooked low-lying island nations. Their current day situation is dire. In her new book project, Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise Professor Christina Gerhardt combines cartography and geography, literary studies and creative non-fiction, and environmental studies and environmental humanities to present the current climate change induced impacts on low lying islands and the solutions being put forward to them, oftenby the indigenous inhabitants of the islands themselves.

Professor Gerhardt’s writing related to environmental humanities has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Humanities and Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, and in the edited volumes Water: An Atlas (2017), My Ocean Guide (2017), Environment and Pedagogy in Higher Education (2018), Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First Travel Writing in German (2019) and Make Waves: Water in Contemporary Literature and Film (2019).

She is also an environmental journalist, covering the annual UN climate negotiations, renewable energy and related legislation and direct action. She has been published (under “Tina Gerhardt”) in ClimateProgress.org, grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive and the Washington Monthly.

Co-sponsored by the Yale German and English Departments.