I write from Tampa, Florida, where last year’s back-to-back hurricanes have subsided into this year’s drought, and where I have been thinking obsessively about the university as environmental infrastructure. Like Virginia Woolf’s narrator Mary Beton in A Room of One’s Own, I have “sat down on the banks of a river” on a university campus. I’ve thought about how this place “once… was marsh too” and still would be if not for the labor of previous generations “to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain.” I have “walk[ed] across a grass plot” on that campus, and there was no Beadle there to tell me women cannot walk on the turf. But when I began in 2024 to ask questions like, “Why are there so few native plants here?” and “Could we have a campus community garden?”, I was told only that decisions about landscaping are the purview of upper administration (and not, I inferred, English professors). And like Mary Beton, I felt abashed.

I have been tasked with introducing “Letters from the Field”, a new series of blog correspondences on doing modernist studies while living through climate change and calamities. “Letters from the Field” grows out of conversations that have taken place at online and in-person events organized by the MSA’s Modernism and the Environment special interest group (SIG) over the past two years. We bring these conversations to forum on Modernism, Energy, and Environment in the hope of having the broader community participate in the exchange. To situate you in the conversation, I’ll provide an account of how this collaborative project came about before sharing my own reflections on what it might mean to think, act, and study together as things fall apart again and again.