ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES CONGRESS

INDIANA DUNES, CALUMET REGION & THE GREAT LAKES

AN INVITATION TO AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION

JUNE 19-22, 2025

A weekend for environmental philosophers, theorists, and cultural historians to converse with local communities, activists, and professionals in one of the most beautiful and fragile ecosystems in the Midwestern United States

SEE ALL

VENUE

MEETING LOCATIONS ALONG LAKE MICHIGAN

WITHIN THE INDIANA DUNES NATIONAL PARKS

OUR STORY

FEATURED SPEAKERS
CONVERSATION PARTNERS
AND TOUR GUIDES

Erin Argyilan

A former IU Northwest Professor of Geosciences, Erin Argyilan studies lake levels and shoreline behavior of the Great Lakes. A well known public intellectual, 2016 winner of the Paul H. Douglas Memorial Award from the Save the Dunes organization, Erin has given public talks about shoreline erosion in the Calumet, and worked with co-leader and State Geologist Dr. Todd Thompson on ground-breaking research on Mt. Baldy, one of the most famous dunes of the region. Erin is currently the Education Coordinator for the Great Lakes Research and Education Center for the National Parks Service. Erin will be a co-leader of our Friday morning guided bus tour of the parks region.

Elizabeth Grennan Browning

Elizabeth Grennan Browning has been deeply engaged in state and regional environmental initiatives while working at Indiana University. She is now an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Oklahoma, working at the intersection of environmental, urban, and capitalist history. Her book Nature’s Laboratory: Environmental Thought and Labor Radicalism in Chicago, 1886-1937 examines the complex ways that environmental theories and cultural imaginings of nature shaped contentious public debates about the conflict between labor and capital and the fate of American democracy in the modern industrial age. She will help us see the complex and fraught interworkings of this fragile ecosystem with its urban neighbor.

Harris Feinsod

Harris is a literary and cultural historian of the Americas and the Atlantic world. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (2017). His current work in maritime studies includes a book project, “Into Steam: The Worlds of Modernism at Sea.” As Associate Professor of English and as affiliate of the Program in Environment, Policy and Culture at Northwestern University, he has pursued several Lake Michigan shoreline research and teaching initiatives. He will share his research with us on what he calls "the reciprocal shoreline" between burns harbor and Northwestern University.

Robert Melchior Figueroa

Robert is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion (SHPR) at Oregon State University. He specializes in Environmental Justice Studies, Philosophy of Heritage, Environmental Identity, Climate Refugees, Critical Race and Latin@ Theory, Critical Geography, Feminist Philosophy, and Philosophy for Children. He will help us contextualize our own experiment in conceiving environmental justice as a dialogic engagement with a place on earth.

Ann Keating

Ann is the Dr. C. Frederick Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College. Her many books and essays on the history of the Chicagoland region include Invisible Networks: Exploring the History of Local Utilities and Public Works, Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago, and Chicagoloand: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age. Ann will help us contextualize the complex and fraught inter-relationship of the Dunes region to Chicagoland in the period of modern industrialization.

John Low

John N. Low, JD, Ph.D., a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, a professor in the Department of Comparative Studies, the Director of Newark Earthworks Center, an affiliated faculty of American Indian Studies in the Department of History
at Ohio State University-Newark, he is winner of the American Society for Ethnohistory Robert F. Heizer Award for his article "Vessels for Recollection - The Canoe Building Renaissance in the Great Lakes" Material Culture (Spring 2015). A long-time resident and scholar of the region, he will help us orient ourselves to storied communal and environmental histories of this special place on earth.

Todd Thompson

Todd A. Thompson, Ph.D., CPG, is the Director of the Indiana Geological and Water Survey and the State Geologist of Indiana with an adjunct position in the Indiana University Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He has a long career of studying the physical limits and timing of lake-level change and concomitant shoreline behavior in the upper Great Lakes. He began working in the Indiana Dunes area in the 1980s and has produced a body of literature redefining the geological history of the region. Todd will co-lead a bus tour focusing on geology, geomorphology, and hazards.

Billie Kerner Warren

A citizen of the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi Nation, founder of Jibek Mbwakawen, Billie is widely known in the Great Lakes region as a community leader, cultural interpreter, and environmental activist. She will take us to the Douglas Park Nature Center to explore traditional Potawatomi stewardship where the Big and Little Calumet River flows. She will use hiking and storytelling to teach us about the community's traditional relation to land and water, its harmonious communion with oak savannas, wild rice, cranberries, and milkweed, and the close relationship of this stewardship of the land with the community's language, culture, and traditions.

Kimmie Gordon

Founder of "Brown Faces Green Spaces" and prominent Calumet environmental justice advocate, Kimmie will give a practicum workshop on helping youth gain access to the natural beauty they have been historically denied.

EVENTS

CALUMET ECO-HISTORY TOUR

CENTURY OF PROGRESS ARCHITECTURE TOUR

FIRST NATIONS KEYNOTE SPEAKER

NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE Q&A

GRADUATE STUDENT
PAPER COMPETION

Click here for details.

INSTITUTIONAL
SUPPORTS

Indiana University

Eppley Center for Parks and Public Lands (Indiana University Bloomington)

The Hermeneutics in Real Life Project (HinRL)

International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP)

North American Society of Philosophical Hermeneutics (NASPH)

Society for Ricoeur Studies

PROGRAM-AT-A-GLANCE

ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES CONGRESS

INDIANA DUNES, CALUMET REGION & THE GREAT LAKES

AN INVITATION TO AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION

JUNE 19-22, 2025

VENUE

FEATURED SPEAKERS
CONVERSATION PARTNERS
AND TOUR GUIDES

EVENTS

GRADUATE STUDENT
PAPER COMPETION

INSTITUTIONAL
SUPPORTS

Sign up for updates

PROGRAM-AT-A-GLANCE

ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES CONGRESS

INDIANA DUNES, CALUMET REGION & THE GREAT LAKES

AN INVITATION TO AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION

JUNE 19-22, 2025

VENUE

FEATURED SPEAKERS CONVERSATION PARTNERS AND TOUR GUIDES

EVENTS

GRADUATE STUDENT PAPER COMPETION

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTS

Sign up for updates

FEATURED SPEAKERS
CONVERSATION PARTNERS
AND TOUR GUIDES

GRADUATE STUDENT
PAPER COMPETION

INSTITUTIONAL
SUPPORTS