Religion and the American Environment

Advanced seminar course exploring representations of the natural world in American cultural history from the era of contact through the nineteenth century. Readings consist of primary sources--landscape paintings, novels, philosophical treatises, poems, sermons, and travel literature--as well as secondary studies of these works by leading scholars in the fields of Anthropology, Art History, Environmental History, Intellectual/Cultural History, Literature, and Religious Studies. Topics covered may include Native American environmental practices, Puritanism and the concept of `wilderness,` the place of nature in early American travel narratives and novels, the Hudson River School of landscape painters, and American Transcendentalism.