Certificate in Culture, History and Environment

The CHE certificate, administered by the Nelson Institute's Center for Culture, History, and Environment, captures the spirit of interdisciplinarity at the heart of CHE and the collaborations that have been forged across the Nelson Institute, the College of Letters & Science, and the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Departments, programs, and schools represented by CHE faculty and graduate students include American Indian Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Botany, Community and Environmental Sociology, English, Forest and Wildlife Ecology, Gender and Women's Studies, Geography, History, History of Science, Journalism and Mass Communication, Law, Landscape Architecture, Limnology, and Zoology.

The environmental challenges we face today arise as much from human actions as from natural processes. Only at our peril do we forget that nature, in all its myriad forms, is inextricably bound up with every aspect of human culture, economy, and politics. In attending to past environmental and cultural change, and in synthesizing diverse research methods and approaches drawn from across the full spectrum of humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, the certificate in culture, history, and environment contributes in important ways to the understanding of past, present, and future environmental issues through interdisciplinary education and research.

Through the CHE Environmental History Colloquium, the annual place-based workshops, and the Tales from Planet Earth film festival, among other activities, CHE has created a lively, engaged community of faculty, graduate students, and others from a wide array of academic disciplines to investigate environmental and cultural change in the full sweep of human history. The CHE certificate considers applications from students in any graduate degree program at UWMadison. By entering CHE early in their graduate studies and planning carefully, students often can select courses that satisfy both their degree program and CHE requirements.

CHE is not available as a stand-alone graduate degree. Master's and doctoral students who complete the requirements receive a certificate in CHE to supplement their graduate degree, or doctoral students can instead complete the program as an external minor. Doctoral students cannot claim CHE as both a certificate and an external minor; they must choose one or the other.

1. Gain an understanding of a significant variety of disciplinary approaches to the study of environmental change and the interactions of humans with the natural environment.
2. Learn to use differing forms of evidence and methods of analysis that can be employed to understand past environmental change and its human meanings.

A bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited U.S. institution or a comparable degree from an international institution is required. International applicants must have a degree comparable to a regionally accredited U.S. bachelor’s degree. You must have completed your undergraduate degree, or similar, before starting graduate school.

A minimum undergraduate grade-point average (GPA) of 3.00 on the equivalent of the last 60 semester hours (approximately two years of work) or a master’s degree with a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.00 is required. Applicants from an international institution must demonstrate strong academic achievement comparable to a 3.00 for an undergraduate or master’s degree. The Graduate School will use your institution’s grading scale. Do not convert your grades to a 4.00 scale.

Every applicant whose native language is not English, or whose undergraduate instruction was not in English, must provide an English proficiency test score. TOEFL scores must be submitted electronically via ETS. IELTS scores can be submitted electronically or by paper.  Our office address is: UW-Madison Graduate School, Office of Admissions, 232 Bascom Hall, 500 Lincoln Drive, Madison, WI 53706.  Your score will not be accepted if it is more than two years old from the start of your admission term. Country of citizenship does not exempt applicants from this requirement. Language of instruction at the college or university level and how recent the language instruction was taken are the determining factors in meeting this requirement.

Applicants are exempt if: