Noah’s Archive: A Conversation with Julian Yates and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Last May, Professor Julian Yates joined Professor Jeffrey Jerome Cohen to give a virtual talk about their work-in-progress at the “Sea Sense: Blue Humanities and the Early Modern Imaginary” conference. Organized by the UCI Center for Early Cultures and the New Swan Shakespeare Center, the speakers at the conference investigated how the ocean plays an important role in early modern conceptions of environmental problems.

Despite the distance from the East Coast to Arizona, the two scholars have collaborated closely over the years to explore the long history of Noah’s ark “as an expansive trope for narrating the endurance of life during catastrophic climate change.”

In this brief virtual talk, they showed a glimpse of their upcoming book, Noah’s Arkive: Towards an Ecology of Refuge. Click the video below to learn more about Professor Yates and Professor Cohen’s fascinating work!

Dr. Jeffrey Cohen is the dean of humanities in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. He currently serves, with Stacy Alaimo, as co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), the largest professional organization in the environmental humanities.

Dr. Julian Yates is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor of the English department at the University of Delaware. He specializes in Medieval and Renaissance British Literature, literary theory, material culture studies, and questions of ecology / environmental humanities. He is the author of some thirty-five essays on Medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, questions of ecology, the posthuman, and literary theory.