Question A

Let’s start the discussion by framing the impact of the humanistic disciplines on the study of the environment. In what ways have literature, cinema, history, anthropology, etc. contributed to shaping the discourse on Environmental Humanities? And, as a follow-up question, do you believe that Italian scholars have made a distinctive impact on the development of Environmental Humanities at a global level?

Niccolò Scaffai

One of the most significant books in Italian ecological thought is Tempi storici, tempi biologici by Enzo Tiezzi (Reference Tiezzi1984), a chemistry professor at the University of Siena. Tiezzi’s book builds on the ‘two cultures’ debate sparked by C.P. Snow’s famous book The Two Cultures (Reference Snow1959) and La Nouvelle Alliance: Métamorphose de la science by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (Reference Prigogine and Stengers1979) on the ‘new alliance’. From a scientist’s perspective, Tiezzi reasserts the need ‘to seek a difficult but necessary communication between different worlds’ (Reference Tiezzi1984, 66). As he writes, it is necessary ‘to explain to the historian, the sociologist, and the humanist that history, human relationships, and society are not alien to biology and ecology’ (Reference Tiezzi1984, 66).

These reflections aim to emphasise the limits of a humanistic culture that neglects the sphere of ecological relations. As Carlo Ginzburg wrote, the ‘world today is characterized by two related phenomena: the enormous expansion of the human species and the growing fragility of the natural environment. And because the world is threatened, the history of the world must be written, to cite Walter Benjamin, “as it appears to us in moments of peril”’ (Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg and Ginzburg2021, 87). Ginzburg brings to light the importance of the environment – not in order to proclaim that historiography must be directly engaged in resolving ecological problems, but to question the goals and the methods of the discipline. He seeks to understand how, and under what conditions, he can fulfil his vocation: that of telling the history of the world. Albeit rooted in different disciplines, the perspectives of Tiezzi and Ginzburg show how the environmental dimension can only be approached by bringing together diverse forms of knowledge and perspectives, and fostering dialogue between them. It is a dialogue that involves literature (for Jonathan Safran Foer [Reference Safran Foer2010, 28–29], literature can make us ‘believe’ in what we ‘know’, that is, that which we know in theory) and the other arts and humanities disciplines (certainly cinema, the most powerful medium for shaping the contemporary imagination), but also science writing, for example.

The name Carlo Ginzburg is well known, even outside of Italy. But in general – to get to the second part of the question – I don’t think there are many Italian scholars who are considered to be major figures in environmental studies. This is also because of the role Italian Studies occupies in the international context. I think we are witnessing a process of marginalisation, rooted in socio-historical-cultural factors that are, to some extent, independent of the specific methods, themes, and research approaches employed. This process can be resisted, in part, by adopting a more generalised perspective that supports the dialogue between Italian Studies and other areas of literary and humanistic studies. I think it is necessary to promote an interdisciplinary approach to studying the ‘iconic’ spaces of Italy’s historic, cultural, and social landscapes, which are known worldwide through film, the arts, and literature. They are spaces and landscapes we should narrate by going beyond stereotypes (like Italy’s solarity) and privileging representations that are ecologically aware. One example is the space of Naples and the surrounding area, studied by authors like Roberto Saviano and scholars like Marco Armiero and Serenella Iovino, known outside of Italy. Another way to elevate Italian Studies in the environmental studies context is to reread ‘global’ authors like Calvino – authors whose works allow for a grounded, coherent, ecological reading. Calvino’s works in fact unite the two cultures: the book by Tiezzi with which I began my answer cites Calvino often, and it is present in the author’s library, preserved in Rome.

Elena Past

I appreciate that you cite the importance of cinema for the environmental imagination, because I believe the historic divide in many film studies programmes between film philosophy and theory, on the one hand, and film production on the other, has ultimately become a strength as the (multi-)discipline has turned to environmental studies. You discuss the crucial importance of bridging distinct kinds of disciplinary knowledge, and film studies, poised between creating and interpreting, between aesthetics and industry, between medium and message, has been well-positioned to do this. Although ecocinema and ecomedia studies have begun to consolidate relatively recently (with Nadia Bozak’s Reference Bozak2011 The Cinematic Footprint and Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s Reference Maxwell and Miller2012 Greening the Media representing early, signal contributions), these emergent disciplines immediately grasped the importance of reading across narratives, materials, and industry practices. As such, film and media studies have turned to studying infrastructures, extraction, and labour (among other things), and have interwoven new materialist perspectives with critical interpretive practices in ways that have enriched the Environmental Humanities more broadly.

My perspective on the significance of Italian thinkers to environmental thought is necessarily partial, conditioned by my identity as an Italianist and film scholar working in the United States. Because Italian Studies is my primary disciplinary perspective, my own thinking has certainly been transformed by reading groundbreaking Italian ecological and biopolitical history and theory – works by Serenella Iovino, Marco Armiero, Roberto Marchesini, and Monica Gagliano, and also Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Rosi Braidotti, to name a few (and I recognise that not all of these scholars work in Italy or write in Italian, and that the ‘Italianness’ of a work is a more complex question than it might seem). Nevertheless, I do believe that Italian thought is important in the global landscape of ecological thinking. In the introductions to Thinking Italian Animals and the forthcoming Thinking Italian Plants, Deborah Amberson and I cite Roberto Esposito’s assertion that Italian philosophy has historically worked to integrate the categories of life, history, and politics (Reference Esposito2012, 31), rather than seeing them as distinct areas of inquiry. For this and for other reasons (the density of meaning of an Italian word like paesaggio, for example, or the palimpsestic naturalcultural Italian landscape), Italy, in our view, is a particularly generative place from which to think of the interconnected complexities of environments, and of contemporary environmental problems. And Italian philosophers have, we believe, been prominent voices where critical animal studies, critical plant studies, and posthumanism are concerned. This is perhaps not quite the same as saying that in the Environmental Humanities writ large, scholars of Italian Studies occupy a central space. Recent summative work like the exceptionally thoughtful ‘Environmental Humanities and Italy’ entry written for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in Environmental Science by Enrico Cesaretti, Roberta Biasillo, and Damiano Benvegnù (Reference Cesaretti, Biasillo and Benvegnù2023) has traced the evolution of humanistic environmental thinking in Italy and proposed multiple possible futures for the field, providing crucial grounding as well as an invaluable pedagogical tool.

Returning briefly to my film studies perspective, I would also cite two Italian filmmaker-philosophers who are admired and studied outside of Italy: Michelangelo Frammartino and Alice Rohrwacher. In both their filmmaking practice and philosophies of filmmaking, they articulate visions of a cinematic ecology that resists nostalgia, engages deeply with location, and understands both the impact of the film industry and the potential connections it can create and nurture.

Question B

The Environmental Humanities are often presented as a response to pressing contemporary issues. In your research, how, if at all, is this sense of urgency connected to the continuity of environmental processes, the longue durée? Does your work affirm or challenge this commonly perceived urgency?

Elena Past

This is a crucially important question right now, when those of us engaged in environmental studies in the United States are all too aware that the words ‘climate change’ and the thing that is climate change, as well as institutions and structures like the Clean Air Act, funding for alternative energy, and many other environmental issues and initiatives have been politicised and demonised. There is certainly urgency, but we also know that chaos politics is a strategy deliberately aimed to divide and disempower, and that it encourages rapid, reactive responses (not to mention a sense of panic). Working against the imposed timelines of chaos politics, I believe that it is more important than ever, in academia but not only, to embrace the longue durée of history and of ecological time.

Recently, I have been writing about something I am calling ‘long-form media ecology’, a way of thinking about how film and media can deliberately resist the logic of algorithms and the disconnected, short-form content they push (in order to profit from the attention of viewers whose personal data is also reaped for profit). Instead, it is important to maintain a commitment to sustained attention over time, and to the interconnections and relational webs such attention can observe or even create. This is what academics know how to do, and it is also what Timothy Morton describes as ‘the ecological thought’, which thinks through coexistence, relationality, and the ‘mesh of lifeforms’ (Reference Morton2012, 4), a thinking that allows for a politics attuned to the long arc of planetary time. In the Environmental Humanities, a long-form ecological perspective might mean doubling down on complex archival work that uncovers the long histories of extraction, for example. It might mean, as teachers of environmental studies, resisting short-form assignments (or, provocatively, forgoing short stories, short films, short essays) and considering how to teach students cognitive skills for sustained attention. (My students, aware that they are addicted to scrolling and social media, love to talk about dopamine detoxes, but to practise these is a difficult matter.) For me, long-form media ecology means thinking about the dilated time of cinema, seen across the geological forms featured in films, or through the critical minerals and metals in the technologies which make films, or across the relationships built and sustained when thoughtful productions engage meaningfully with locations of filming.

In sum, I believe that it is more critical than ever to embrace the intellectual tools we have as academics, and to practice and teach the historically (although not always operationally) patient, deep work of academic inquiry. In this line of inquiry, too, I take inspiration from Italian thinkers, including Carlo Petrini and the Slow Food movement, and Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought (Reference Cassano2012) and his resistance to the imposed urgencies of turbocapitalism. For this kind of temporal-ecological work, Italian philosophies and cultural practices offer powerful models of resistance.

Niccolò Scaffai

Literature is part of the system of knowledges via which we know and interpret the reality around us, the elements of individual and collective existence that affect us. For this reason, literature cannot ignore the urgent questions of the contemporary world that impact the lives of individuals and communities. As scholars of literature, it would be limiting to ignore this epistemic potential and deceive oneself (or pretend to) that the contemporary world and its pressing concerns must remain outside our horizon of interest. Nevertheless, I believe that the relationship between literature and the present should not be reduced to (let alone consist of) a ‘salvific’ idea of literature – that is, to its immediate possibility to lead to change and confront urgent questions like the climate crisis. Literature does not have a mission but rather a function. In critical language, we often use the word ‘function’ to identify a line connecting an author or a more recent work to other authors and works that precede it in time, moving backwards from the contemporary period to the origins. The defining quality of the function is that of illuminating the past in light of the present, delineating a particular strand of the literary tradition and reinterpreting it.

From the present, questions arise to interrogate the past. And the past, in turn, offers elements to correct our perspectives on contemporary questions. I think this principle is particularly effective for placing the longue durée of literary tradition in relation to the present, especially with regard to ecocritical themes. In my work, I have written in this sense about the ‘Anthropocene-function’. We might ask ourselves: but if the planetary crisis is a recent concern, what traditions can we talk about? In reality, the emergence and at least partial awareness of changes brought by humans to ecological balance can be traced throughout the centuries of modernity, and perhaps even to classical antiquity. The most important point is another, though: because it is difficult to definitively establish when the Anthropocene began, and above all when humans began to impact ecosystems, it is equally complicated and perhaps wrong to ask if authors who lived in a more or less remote past expressed or anticipated ecological concerns according to the meaning we assign today to this expression. We can speak of an ecology of the ancient world, for example, but it is important to specify that in the Classical period, the protection of nature was not based on environmental awareness, but rather on other values – above all, ethical and religious values. It would be better to begin a discussion with authors who first had an awareness of processes of transformation, elaborating perspectives in an anti-anthropocentric vein. For Italian literature, for example, a point of departure could be Giacomo Leopardi, and in particular the Leopardi of the Operette morali (Reference Leopardi and Meloni2008), which are exemplary illustrations of a relativistic perspective associated with a thematic sphere (the theme of extinction, the defamiliarising perspective of other species) that characterises today’s ecological literature. It is not by chance that Leopardi is frequently studied today, both in Italy and in the international field of Italian Studies, from this perspective. The objective is not to superimpose foreign meaning on literary works, but to uncover motifs already immanent in the texts: motifs that, from a contemporary perspective, become more clear and more relevant. In this sense, the Anthropocene function can activate a dynamic rereading of the canon, from the nineteenth century to twentieth-century classics. It can indicate ways of engaging with those classics outside of the usual frameworks, against the grain. It can attract, alongside the most celebrated names, the names of lesser-known writers who are less present in literary histories.

Question C

What is the impact of the Environmental Humanities for Italian Studies and history? Do the Environmental Humanities respond to the isolation of Italian disciplines?

Elena Past

The introduction to Serenella Iovino’s Ecocriticism and Italy (Reference Iovino2016) brilliantly frames Italy as both a material, political place and a generator of ideas and categories: a place where ‘specific, individual stories of … place mirror, involve, and meet those of countless other places and beings, just as it happens for the Niger Delta when observed via the lens of Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” or to the American country villages in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring’ (3). Iovino’s work, which includes the seminal Material Ecocriticism, co-edited with Serpil Oppermann (Reference Iovino and Oppermann2014), as well as the imaginative Italo Calvino’s Animals: Anthropocene Stories (Reference Iovino2021; expanded and published in Italian as Gli animali di Calvino: Storie dall’Antropocene, Reference Iovino2023), has ably and strategically moved between a broad philosophical approach to the Environmental Humanities and a lively, innovative view of Italy and Italian Studies. In the process, her work has helped to draw Italian Studies into dialogue with scholars in other fields, focused on other places, or situated in different institutional academic traditions.

Iovino’s appointment as Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is the first such appointment of which I am aware in the United States, and it signals a concrete disciplinary – and perhaps administrative – opening, with several other important scholars following suit. Serena Ferrando at Arizona State University now has the title of Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and Italian, and Federico Luisetti is Full Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland. These new scholarly designations are one, visible way in which Italians scholars are demonstrating their commitment to bridging areas of inquiry and hybridising Italian Studies.

Italian Studies has long been interdisciplinary and multilingual, and yet it is nevertheless true that in recent years, important Italian programmes have been under threat of closure. In the landscape of increasingly monolingual (or AI-generated multilingual) academia, I think it is crucially beneficial to show – as Iovino does – how Italy offers a lens for understanding the world; to collaborate with allies across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences; and to depart from Italy and Italian to articulate knotty global problems and conceive of radical, visionary ideas that resonate far beyond the peninsula. Alongside innovative programmes in Transnational Italian Studies, the Environmental Humanities offers an integrative mesh of disciplinary thinking that can help reinvigorate Italian language programmes, increase their visibility within universities, and energise students, dissertations, and research initiatives.

Niccolò Scaffai

Studies of ecology and literature have had a growing impact in the last years. In Italy, these have been facilitated in part by significant financing from the European Union for interdisciplinary projects on the environment. Hence, newly created networks of scholars from different fields have collaborated on common initiatives: conferences, publications, digital tools. In the last few years, I have directed Project LEDA: For an Atlas of Italian Ecological Literature: From the Great Acceleration to the Pandemic, that will create an online map of ecological narratives across the peninsula. Furthermore, the 2026 MOD conference (of the Società italiana per lo studio della modernità letteraria) was dedicated to themes and questions connected to ecocriticism. This is a notable renewal of the traditions of Italian Studies, which has benefited from contact with the international academic community (in my case, for example, a decade of research and teaching in the research centre on ‘durabilité’ in Lausanne, Switzerland was important). To Elena Past’s list of scholars and initiatives I would add, for example, l’Observatoire des Récits et Imaginaires de l’Anthropocène at the University of Ghent in Belgium, and the interdisciplinary professorships and doctoral programmes focused on ecocriticism in France and Italy.

The context has certainly fostered increased international dialogue between Italian Studies and other humanistic and scientific disciplines. Adopting a perspective of general interest – predominantly thematic, instead of philological and linguistic – promotes dialogue with other areas. It increases literature’s capacity to engage with social and historical issues of collective concern. Nevertheless, the fear is that even this opening is not sufficient to consolidate the role of Italian Studies in the international context. For several years now, indeed, a process of marginalisation or contraction has been underway, in Europe no less than in the United States and other countries. It is a process driven by historical-cultural and political factors that are partially independent of the particular methods, themes, and perspectives adopted by research in Italian Studies.

Question D

May I ask about what triggered your interest in the Environmental Humanities? What has inspired your personal perspectives in the Environmental Humanities?

Niccolò Scaffai

The path that led me to study the relationship between literature and ecology began with an interest in the evolution of forms and structures over the course of history. From the beginning, this perspective did not just relate to Italian Studies, but also theory and comparative literature. At the beginning of the 2000s, I started to work on the persistence of some themes central to European literature, like the idea of landscape and nature, from the topical theme of the locus amoeunus through contemporary representations of ecological themes. The study of the relationship between literature and ecology became one of the primary threads in my research, starting with the chapter on Ecologia e letteratura for Letteratura europea (Scaffai Reference Scaffai, Boitani and Fusillo2014). My work in this area considers the theme’s historical development (indispensable for understanding the relationship between literature and the environment in European cultures, which are so profoundly stratified in time). I place history in relation to the rhetorical devices and narrative structures of the texts. On this topic, I have edited Nature, Ecology, and Literature (Reference Scaffai2010) and a dossier on Ecopoetry. La poesia del degrado ambientale (Reference Scaffai2018). But the most significant work, both for its theoretical commitment and the breadth of its comparative perspectives, as well as the critical and cultural reception, is the monograph Letteratura e ecologia. Forme e temi di una relazione narrativa (Reference Scaffai2017), followed by Racconti del pianeta Terra (Reference Scaffai2022) and Sotto l’inesauribile superficie delle cose. Il paradigma della profondità nell’immaginario dell’Antropocene (Reference Scaffai2025). Approaching the ecological dimension through literature has meant adopting a framework grounded in historicity and forms of representation. Rather than ‘using’ literature to confirm ethical, civic, or environmental claims, I have sought to understand how literature contributes, with its own distinctive resources, to ecological discourse.

Elena Past

I know that we are approaching our word limit, so I will simply say that my interest in the Environmental Humanities emerged at the intersection of my work in Italian studies and a deep personal commitment to environmental questions. Finding my way to ecocriticism and the communities practising the Environmental Humanities has been both intellectually energising and personally rewarding. I am grateful to be part of a field that feels so generous, capacious, and deeply relevant – and I thank Patrizia Sambuco and the editors for inviting us to reflect, together, on this evolving disciplinary landscape.