PROJET EMERGENCE « AmHealth »: Projet « Health and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century United States’ Literature and Culture », 2023-2025, dir. Thomas Contantinesco

Project “AmHealth”: Health and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century United States’ Literature and Culture

This project aims to investigate the tangled histories of health and ecological crises as they are represented in a wide range of literary and cultural productions of the nineteenth-century United States. It focuses on the notion of “environment” as a complex nexus of contradictory theorizations and pressures, between a natural resource for obtaining or preserving health and a human-made site where toxic forces have pushed many species on the verge of extinction. Doing so, the project elaborates literary and cultural criticism as a set of methods for thinking about the interrelated, and ongoing, health and ecological crises that shape our current condition through a reconsideration of what biomedical science calls “environmental factors.”

While centered around the A19 research group (Sorbonne Université VALE / Université Paris Cité LARCA), the project will also contribute to advance the integration of American literary and cultural studies within the perimeter of the Bio-Medical Humanities Initiative at Sorbonne Université, in order to position it as a key research center in France for studying health-related questions in the Anglosphere.

PI: Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne Université / VALE)

Team members: Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau (Sorbonne Université / VALE) ; Vincent Maréchal (Sorbonne Université / Biologie et thérapeutiques du cancer) ; Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité / LARCA) ; Yves Figuereido (Université Paris Cité / LARCA) ; Édouard Marsoin (Université Paris Cité / LARCA)

Buget: 90 000 €