2025 Humanities for the Environment Distinguished Lecture and Seres Puentes Award Presentation

The Personal, the Impersonal, and the Public: Writing Environmental Humanities for a Mainstream Newspaper

In this presentation, Serenella Iovino delves into her experiences as a columnist for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and its cultural magazine, Robinson. Drawing on the intrinsic nature of Environmental Humanities as fundamentally Public Humanities, Iovino illustrates how she translates theoretical insights from her academic work into accessible articles for the broader public. She examines the synergy between scholarly research and journalistic expression, offering insights into how environmental issues can be effectively communicated to a non-specialist audience. This lecture encourages students to consider the potential of Environmental Humanities to influence public discourse and invites them to explore journalistic writing as a valuable extension of their academic endeavors.

Serenella Iovino is the James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor in Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Ph.D. program in Italian Studies. An acclaimed author and editor, Iovino has made substantial contributions to environmental humanities, focusing on ecocritical theories, landscape studies, environmental justice, and the ethical dimensions of human-nonhuman relationships. She has published twelve volumes and over 200 essays and articles. Her influential works in English include Material Ecocriticism (Indiana UP, 2014) and Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), both co-edited with Serpil Oppermann, and Italy and the Environmental Humanities (University of Virginia Press, 2018), co-edited with E. Cesaretti and E. Past. Her monograph, Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (Bloomsbury, 2016), received the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize and the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies. Her latest publication, Gli animali di Calvino: Storie dell’Antropocene (Treccani, 2023), won the Italian National Prize for Scientific Outreach. Iovino is also the series co-editor and founder (with Louise Westling and Timo Maran) of the popular “Elements in Environmental Humanities” series from Cambridge University Press, which has significantly shaped international scholarship in the field. A philosopher by training, she is a leading public intellectual and columnist for the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, where she brings complex environmental issues into public discourse.