Molluscan Explosion: The Dutch Shipworm Epidemic of the 1730s
An invasive mollusk called the shipworm (Teredo navalis) attacked coastal dikes in the Netherlands in the 1730s, leading to changes in the design of dikes.
An invasive mollusk called the shipworm (Teredo navalis) attacked coastal dikes in the Netherlands in the 1730s, leading to changes in the design of dikes.
This virtual exhibition features, in English translation, short excerpts from German-language literary texts that address human-nature entanglements. The aim is to show how literature can contribute to understanding and problematizing the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. What aspects of human-nature relations are addressed, at what point in literary history, and how are they shaped poetically? For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In this chapter of the German-language version of her virtual exhibition, “Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur (Human-Nature Relations in German Literature),” Sabine Wilke examines mountains and glacial environments in German-language literary descriptions. Whereas the German Romantic poets still highlighted mountainous nature as deeply ambiguous, Goethe’s Faust tried to understand mountainous nature in its materiality through scientific studies. Modernism focuses on the more often destructive results of human-nature entanglements. For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.
Is the Arctic the last frontier? With text, audio, and video, historian Elena Baldassarri describes the historical struggle to find a passage through the perilous environments of the Far North. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “The Northwest Passage: Myth, Environment, and Resources.”
In this chapter of her virtual exhibition “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke discusses texts that register transformations of landscapes or take a position on their causes. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
Introduccíon de la exposición virtual de Ricardo Rozzi et al., De lupas a telescopios: Explorando el microcosmos y el macrocosmos en los laboratorios bioculturales de Chile.
In this chapter of her virtual exhibition “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke examines forests and deforestation in works by Adalbert Stifter, Marlen Haushofer, and Elfriede Jelinek. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.