FROZEN! The Climate Crisis of 1816 and Its Lessons for Today
HUMN 4325: Frozen! The Climate Crisis of 1816 and Its Lessons for Today
Cynthia Schoolar Williams, Assistant
Professor
E-mail: williamsc6@wit.edu
Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences
Wentworth Institute of
Technology
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FROZEN! The Climate Crisis of 1816 is an elective I teach regularly at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. We do not currently offer a major in English. (Our students pursue bachelor’s degrees in architecture, industrial design, applied math, six fields of engineering, construction management, and computer science.) Because of the university’s orientation toward STEAM, I’ve designed the class so that our engagement with Romanticism emerges within an interdisciplinary context. Therefore, I believe this submission offers a valuable model for revivifying Romanticism in a non-liberal arts setting.
Our starting point for the class is the eruption of Mt. Tambora in April of 1815, which caused a three-year global weather catastrophe and ushered in the last great subsistence crisis of the West. Geographically, the syllabus moves from the British East Indies to the U.S. and Europe, with special focus, of course, on Geneva in the summer of 1816. We also move forward in time so that after many weeks examining what Coleridge called “end of the world weather,” we broach climate disruption in our own day.
Throughout the semester, our engagement with literature evolves from the students’ orientation in the technical fields. For example, as you’ll see below, a colleague from Applied Math visits the class to explore the first known global pandemic, an outbreak of cholera in the wake of Tambora’s eruption. She leads the students in using simulation software to model disease transmission; together, they also digest data offered in a scientific paper on aquatic reservoirs. Then, during the following class, I introduce materials I’ve pulled from the local historical society. These include notices from city and state boards of health exposing the putative connection between susceptibility and social class—and also a poem titled “Lines Composed on the Prevailing Malignant Cholera,” which anticipates the arrival of the disease on the east coast of the U.S. We find that the software, scientific paper, and communiqués provide important context for understanding the artistic choices the poet has made in his work. As even this single example shows, the quantitative and qualitative effectively catalyze each other.
Moreover, it suggests the degree to which canonical Romantic texts are complemented in the syllabus by works across a broad range of literary forms. Through this approach, my students come to understand that climate is not just a set of data (as important as those data are); climate is also a discourse with a cultural history that can be illuminated through literary study. If, as Lawrence Buell has maintained, our current environmental emergency involves a crisis of the imagination, my class presents Romanticism as just such a literature of crisis.
By the end of the semester, we venture appropriate connections between that two-hundred-year-old phenomenon of global cooling and our own experience of planetary warming. Here, we engage more fully with the only text I require for purchase, Maureen McLane’s 2014 volume This Blue: Poems. Her work allows us to see this literary tradition freshly deployed, asking: How do we keep the fragility of climate before us? How do we weather our own times?
Other features to highlight include an emphasis on archival research; the deployment of interdisciplinary teamwork; inclusion of what we call an “external partner” on the final day of class; and the generosity of colleagues who offer guest lectures. What follows is an example of a spring semester calendar.
CLASS SCHEDULE
Class # // Subject and/or assignments due |
|
1 |
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW |
2 |
Assignment: Read these two articles on Blackboard and complete Response Paper 1
In-class focus: the Little Ice Age (climatic context) and frost fairs on the Thames (cultural context) “Great Britain’s Wonder, or, London’s Admiration.” Printed by Haley and Millett, London, 1684. |
3 |
Assignment: Read these two items and complete Response Paper 2
In-class resources:
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4 |
Assignment: Each interdisciplinary team should read its assigned article and report to the class, amplifying with any outside research you feel illuminates the text—
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5 |
Assignment: Work on archival report continues Guest Lecture by Professor Greg Sirokman (Chemistry): The physics and chemistry of volcanic explosion and impact on climate |
6 |
Assignment: Work on archival report continues In-class activities: preparing for your archives-based project by examining the following articles:
|
7 |
Assignment: Archival report due Goals: assess how the eruption of Tambora affected New England and northern Europe by accessing databases of 19th-century newspapers; distinguish between primary and secondary sources; evaluate data that is not numerical or scientific. VISIT TO SCHUMANN LIBRARY AND LEARNING COMMONS to begin Team Work |
8 |
In-class activities: Volcanoes in Western cultural tradition Central texts:
Also considered:
Image survey: Vesuvius in works by Joseph Wright of Derby, Jacobin pamphleteers, John Martin, J. M. W. Turner, Andy Warhol, and Andrew McCollum (“The Dog of Pompeii”) |
9 |
Assignment: Read this article and complete Response Paper 3
In-class resources:
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10 |
Assignment: 2 Teams present Team 1: Food riots and political unrest in England Related resources:
Team 2: Tree rings as proxy data Related resource:
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11 |
Assignment: 2 Teams present Team 3: The Erie Canal Related resource:
Team 4: Luke Howard Related resources:
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12 |
Assignment: 2 Teams present Team 5: British exploration of North Pole and Barrow’s role Related resources:
Team 6: Ice cores as proxy data Related resources:
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13 |
Assignment: Read these items in preparation for class discussion
In-class activities: The Geneva summer; comparison of Alps passages in 1818 and 1831 texts of Frankenstein. Topics: mutability; discourse of mastery vs. discourse of fragility |
14 |
Assignment: Read these articles and complete Response Paper 4
Related resource:
|
15 |
Guest Lecture by Prof. Lawrence DeGeest (Economics): The economic crisis of 1819 in the United States due to fluctuations in grain markets |
16 |
SITE VISIT TO MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS Assignment: Contribute to discussion board on one of works on our itinerary. Which of the four functions of art does the work fulfill in relation to climate disruption? |
17 |
Assignment: read this article and complete Response Paper 5
In-class visual survey: Sky paintings of Turner and Constable |
18 |
Guest Lecture: Prof. Mami Wentworth (Applied Math) on the cholera pandemic after Tambora In-class resource:
In-class activities: modeling of cholera pandemic using SiR simulation software. Each team will complete the mini-lab, inputting new variables and values. Did Tambora cause the first global pandemic? |
19 |
Assignment: Annotated Bibliography due In-class resources:
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20 |
Guest Lecture: Professor Robert Cowherd (Architecture) on his work in Bali and Jakarta. |
21 |
In-class activity: Keats, “To Autumn” Bring to class: McLane, Maureen N., This Blue: Poems. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2014. |
22&23 |
13 students present work in progress (individual research) Half the class will present in this “dynamic poster session”: each student will set up a laptop to scroll a visual overview of his or her research project. All students will provide feedback via backchannel, which will be projected in real time onto front screen. In-class activity: Maureen McLane, This Blue: Poems. |
24 |
Assignment: read this article and short story and respond to prompt via Discussion Board
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25 |
Last regularly-structured class: SUMMARY OF THE SEMESTER In-class activity: Select one poem from a list of McLane works and use it as a prompt for your “concluding remarks” on the semester. Guest lecture: Founder and CEO of a company crowd-sourcing data on climate change in mountainous regions used for sport. |
26 |
Individual research essay due. |
