The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities - (Bloomsbury Handbooks) (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Bringing together two parallel and occasionally intersecting disciplines - the environmental and medical humanities - this field-defining handbook reveals our ecological predicament to be a simultaneous threat to human health. The book:

- Represents the first collection to bring the environmental humanities and medical humanities into conversation in a systematic way
- Features contributions from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives including literary studies, environmental ethics and philosophy, cultural history and sociology
- Adopts a truly global approach, examining contexts including, but not limited to, North America, the UK, Africa, Latin America, South Asia, Turkey and East Asia
- Touches on issues and approaches such as narrative medicine, ecoprecarity, toxicity, mental health, and contaminated environments.

Showcasing and surveying a rich spectrum of issues and methodologies, this book looks not only at where research currently is at the intersection of these two important fields, but also at where it is going.

Review Quotes

"The first of its kind at the intersection of the titular fields, is a timely and welcome contribution to bridge the gap between medical, environmental, and literary-cultural studies. ... the medical-environmental humanities have its new reference guide for graduate students and scholars in the field." --Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

"This volume proves an invaluable addition to the study of narrative medicine and public health, and the links between the clinical and the ecocultural. With a fascinating array of cultures and approaches, the essays offer a full-belly intervention into the field." --Journal of Ecohumanism

"This collection offers a crucial intervention at an urgent time. The pandemic has driven home the inseparability of human health and environmental health. The first to bring together the medical and environmental humanities in a global conversation, this book outlines how we might better align the health of the planet with the health of human minds and bodies." --Sarah Jaquette Ray, Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies, Humboldt State University, USA, and author of 'A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet'

"Located at a crucial juncture in the precarious age when 'health' - of individuals, communities and the planet - is at risk, this volume defines the future of academic work in environmental and medical-health humanities. Mapping debates and methodologies across literary-cultural studies, this is an indispensable exploration as to the importance of human and nonhuman lives." --Pramod K Nayar, University of Hyderabad India, author of 'Bhopal's Ecological Gothic' and 'Ecoprecarity'

"Together, the dozens of fascinating and insightful essays included in Slovic, Rangarajan, and Sarveswaran's Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities do much more than explore convergences between two closely related yet seldom intersecting fields. They additionally chart timely and welcome paths for news ways of engaging with global challenges - including pandemics and climate disruption - that are becoming only more severe." --Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA, author of 'Ecoambiguity' and 'Global Healing'

About the Author

Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities and has been teaching at the University of Idaho, USA, since 2012-previously he was a professor at Texas State University and the University of Nevada, Reno. He served as founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from 1992 to 1995, and since 1995 he has edited ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment for ASLE and Oxford University Press. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of twenty-seven books, including, most recently, The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (with Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran). His forthcoming books include Nature in Literary Studies (coedited with Peter Remien) for Cambridge University Press's Critical Concepts Series. He coedits Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment with Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Routledge Environmental Humanities with Joni Adamson and Yuki Masami.

Swarnalatha Rangarajan is Associate Professor of English and has been teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras since 2010. Previously, she was a Fulbright Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and a Charles Wallace Fellow at Cambridge University. She has coedited such books as Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (2014) and Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015) (with Scott Slovic and Vidya Sarveswaran) and is the author of the novel Final Instructions (2015). She served as the founding editor of The Indian Journal of Ecocriticism and has guest-edited two special issues on Indian ecosophy for The Trumpeter. Her monograph Ecocriticism: Big Ideas and Practical Solutions appeared in 2018.

Vidya Sarveswaran is Professor of English and has been teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur since 2012. Before that she taught for thirteen years at Ethiraj College for Women in Chennai. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2008-09, and in 2016 she was a Rachel Carson Fellow at the University of Munich. As mentioned above, she coedited Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development, Ecocriticism of the Global South, and The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication with Scott Slovic and Swarnalatha Rangarajan. She is also a documentary filmmaker and has recently been completing a film that documents ecological narratives in Rajasthan.