About the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) is an international research center dedicated to the study of environment and society from a wealth of different disciplines and international perspectives.
The RCC’s mission is to advance education, research, and international cooperation in the field of the environmental humanities and social sciences. It contributes to public and scholarly debates about future ecological and social challenges. By bringing together scholars from various disciplines and national contexts and making a continuous effort to communicate their research to the wider public, the RCC aims to internationalize and raise the profile of the environmental humanities as a globally significant and growing field. To achieve this, the RCC is committed to supporting the publication of state-of-the-art research in the environmental humanities that bridges national and disciplinary divides.
The center has multiple partner institutes across the globe, from Italy to Estonia, from the United States to China. Among its German partners, the RCC has particularly close ties with the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
The center features a number of graduate programs: the structured doctoral program Environment and Society (ProEnviron), the international doctoral program “Rethinking Environment” (IDK) in cooperation with the University of Augsburg, an MA certificate program in environmental studies, and the master’s program Environment and Society. The RCC is home to numerous research projects, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the European Research Council (ERC), the Volkswagen Foundation, the Federal Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF), and others. Finally, it hosts a rotating group of international visiting scholars, fellows, and visiting doctoral students. The center’s over 300 postdoctoral and professorial alumni form the Society of Fellows.
While the RCC is based in Munich, Germany, its staff and research community come from all over the world, and the working language is English.
The center’s namesake is the US biologist, nature writer, and environmentalist Rachel Carson (1907–1964), whose work raised awareness worldwide of threats to the environment and human health. Learn more about the life and work of Rachel Carson here.
