Exploring the Kinney Center
Students of UMass Amherst’s English 190N course explored rare books held in the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. Audrey Falkner.
As part of their explorations, the UMass Amherst undergraduate course English 190N Environment, Climate Change, and the Humanities visited the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. The Kinney Center is home to manuscripts, rare books, and monographs, sponsored lectures, seminars, conferences, community classes, theater, and concerts. Students got the chance to work hands on with some of the rare books in the collection and explored recent work displayed at the center as part of the Center’s Renaissance of the Earth project, a series of interdisciplinary research collaborations, undergraduate and graduate courses, hands-on workshops, conferences, and arts programming that consider how legacies of the early modern past inform our environmental future.
Grafting the Archive: From Early Modern Control to Contemporary Repair (2026) Bo Kim
One of the many Renaissance of the Earth projects displayed at the Kinney Center.
Walnut ink drawing on grafted SCOBY and mulberry paper. 2025-2026 Renaissance of the Earth Fellow
English 190N introduces students to the exciting, interdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities, which engages with the relationship between humanistic study and environmental concerns, such as climate change. The course is anchored in literary studies, reading novels and poetry from around the world. However, the course also utilizes other narratives such as those from visual culture. While questions of ecology, environment, landscape, and weather have always played a role in literary, historical, and philosophical inquiries, this course asks how might those critical lenses be utilized to think through urgent concerns such as anthropogenic climate change and unprecedented species extinctions around the world? Questions of climate and species extinctions are generally consigned to scientific enquiry; however, in this course students learn how and why the humanities plays a crucial role in these debates.
Hands on Experience
Students got hands on experience working with some of the rare books in the Kinney Center collection.
