The Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities is a research centre at University of Stavanger, Norway. Get to know us, our vision and history.
About us
The Greenhouse represents both the environment as an object of study and the ways to cultivate a scholarly environment to study it. The environment exists at the junction of nature, technology, and social structures.
The grand challenges of our time – be it climate change, green transitions, nature crises – require involvement from all knowledge domains.
Environmental humanities offers critical and engaged methods and perspectives, crucial to facing these issues and envisioning just, alternative futures.
The Greenhouse supports a growing community of academics who use history, literature, geography, media, art, religion, philosophy, and education to understand how people relate to nature and environment. Scholars in the Greenhouse create connections between academics, museums, civil societies, and members of the public who are interested in environmental issues. Conversation and exchange between scholars and socities allow us to develop more robust and relevant responses to the grand challenges of the time, while also fostering democratic engagement.
Our vision
Working from within a institution and a region transitioning away from oil, the Greenhouse has been instrumental in setting the university’s strategy towards green transitions. Resisting simple techological solutions to complex societal problems, we draw on the strengths of the humanities to shape this development. As environmental humanities scholars we seek to ask questions and stimulate reflection on values and priorities for societies and the world beyond the human.
Building the Greenhouse
The foundations of the Greenhouse were laid in 2017 when professor Dolly Jørgensen and professor Finn Arne Jørgensen launched a research initiative dedicated to environmental humanities at the University of Stavanger.
With a growing research library at its core, the Greenhouse created space for scholars and students to create a community.
Through a number of research and network projects funded by national and international bodies, the Greenhouse became a leading research hub within the rapidly growing field of environmental humanities.
In 2022, the University of Stavanger recognised the importance of our work and its impact by making the Greenhouse an official research centre of the university. Co-directed by its two founders and made possible by the communal efforts of an alternating crop of researchers.
The Greenhouse library
The Greenhouse maintains a world-class environmental humanities research library located at University of Stavanger.
The Greenhouse Library holds close to 2000 books in environmental humanities and related fields, in addition to a collection of academic journals and even some historical primary source material. Most, but not all, of our collection is catalogued on LibraryThing. We frequently add new books to the library, including the books we cover in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series.
Greenhouse members can check out books for shorter periods of time. Other visitors can access the library upon request.
The Greenhouse Library contains a meeting room table and two semi-comfortable reading chairs for use by visitors. We also have a locker that visitors can use. The library has a small kitchenette with a microwave oven and a coffee maker.