The Environmental Humanities is a rapidly expanding field of knowledge and scholarly activity that has arisen from distinct disciplinary traditions within core humanities and social science subjects such as history, literature, anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture studies, religion, philosophy, or language studies.

In recent decades, environmentally orientated sub-strands from each of these disciplines have developed and moved from the margins closer and closer to their centers as the environmental turn in politics, science, social policy, education and media trends has become increasingly prominent.

In recent years, many of these distinct humanistic traditions of environmental study (such as ecocriticism in literature studies, environmental ethics and aesthetics in philosophy, or environmental history) have begun to coalesce into a more integrative field that engages a range of environmental research foci in an interdisciplinary spirit. This humanities-led area of environmental studies marks a necessary complement to the natural sciences, which have dominated the field over the past 50 years and often excluded the social sciences and the humanities.

ECOHUM represents a meaningful commitment to the development of studies in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities at Mid Sweden University.