What are you working with at the moment? How does it relate to Eco-Emotions?
I am reading and translating a brief didactic treatise in Latin called De animae exsilio et patria, which means “On the exile and homeland of the soul”. It was written around 1140 by Honorius Augustodunensis, about whom we know next to nothing, except that he was one of the most popular writers in twelfth-century Europe. I’m generally interested in processes of learning and cognition in the medieval monasteries, which tie in nicely with Eco-Emotions because monastic pedagogy was emphatically affective as well as deeply embedded in physical and built environments: the monks deliberately used their emotions and their landscapes to think with. For example, in De animae exsilio et patria, Honorius vividly portrays the liberal arts – that is, the medieval scholarly curriculum of subjects including grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, music, arithmetic and more – as cities, full of streets, towers, gates, and people, that the student must travel through to reach wisdom and salvation. So, education is a kind of mental pilgrimage. It’s great fun to see how medieval ideas of navigating physical, social and conceptual environments resonate with modern eco-critical notions that emphasize holistic and immersive relations with the environment.
What activity or aspect about Eco-Emotions are you most excited about?
Like the other members, I greatly appreciate the multidisciplinary aspect of the project. Since my work engages with cognitive science, and has done so for more than a decade, I feel very much at home in the rich and playful theoretical discussions at our reading seminars and presentations. Not to mention how much I’m learning about modern global literature!
What do you currently read for pleasure?
Recently, I read a beautiful but disturbing novel, Io non ho paura by Niccolò Ammianti, that made me reflect on perspectives in Eco-Emotions. It’s about a young boy in a fictional, godforsaken rural town in Southern Italy, who discovers a terrible secret in an abandoned house in the countryside. Critics have recognized the main themes in the novel as the loss of childhood innocence and the socio-political tensions between Northern and Southern Italy in the late 1970s. But what struck me most was the scorching, almost claustrophobic landscape of an excruciatingly hot summer, which plays a protagonist in pushing the story towards inevitable disaster. It illustrates well how environments are entangled with our affections, attitudes, and actions.