Participant Biographies:

Stacy Alaimo is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington. She has published essays on feminist theory, green cultural studies, American literature, and film in Feminist Studies, camera obscura, MELUS, Studies in American Fiction , ISLE, as well as in other journals and edited collections.  Her first book, Undomesticated Ground:  Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell, 2000), argues that nature has been a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism. She is currently finishing a book entitled Bodily Natures:  Science, Environment, and the Human Self. This project grapples with one of the most urgent theoretical questions within the humanities—how to understand the agency and significance of material forces.  

Allison Carruth received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2008, graduating with an exciting dissertation entitled Global Appetites: Literary Form and Food Politics from World War I to the World Trade Organization. She currently holds the prestigious Arnhold Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCSB and will begin as an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon in 2009-10.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is an Associate Professor of English at UCLA, where she has been in the Global Fellows Program for two years. She is the author of numerous articles, in journals including Interventions: International Journal of PostcolonialStudies, ISLE, Ariel, and TESG: Journal of Economic and Social Geography. She has also authored Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2007) and co-edited Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005), with George Handley and Renee K. Gossen. In 2007 Professor DeLoughrey was Chair of the MLA Division on Postcolonial Studies in Literature and Culture.

Jill Didur is an Associate Professor of English at Concordia University Montréal. Her current research is a SSHRC funded project entitled “Gardenworthy: Planthunting in South Asian literature and travel writing." This project looks at colonial botany and plant hunting in South Asia and its relation to contemporary South Asian literature concerned with alpine landscapes. She is examining the discursive and material links between the memoirs and plant collecting practices of colonial botanists, contemporary postcolonial writing about the Himalayas by writers such as Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Jamaica Kincaid, and Kiran Desai, and alpine and rock gardening culture globally. This research also considers how postcolonial writing appropriates the travel writing genre, colonial tropes for representing landscape, and tackles topics implicated in the history of colonialism such as environmentalism, conservationism and gardening culture. Some of this work has been presented at recent conferences concerned with literature and the environment and postcolonial ecocriticism.  Her book, Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (U of Toronto Press, 2006) examines the relationship between South Asian Partition narratives, gendered nationalism and historical memory.

Hilal Elver has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara since 2002. She has a law degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Ankara Law School where she started her teaching career. During this period, she was also appointed by the Turkish government as the founding legal advisor of the Ministry of Environment. In 1994, she was appointed to the UNEP Chair in Environmental Diplomacy by the United Nations Environment Program at the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies in Malta. In 1993 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, and in 1996-1998 she was a visiting fellow at the Center of International Studies at Princeton University. Her publications have focused mainly on international environmental law, and international human rights law. Her book, Peaceful Uses of International Rivers: Case of Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, was published in 2002. Currently she is working on a book project dealing with secularism and human rights in the Islamic world.

Bonnie Foote studies the mechanisms by which contemporary environmental narratives, from literature and films to blogs and nonprofit newsletters, influence people's values and behaviors. The literary theory behind this study is laid out in her "The Narrative Interactions of Silent Spring: Bridging Literary Criticism and Ecocriticism," in New Literary History. She received her Ph.D. from the UCLA English Department in 2007 and is currently employed as a lecturer there.

Bishnupriya Ghosh has been an Associate Professor in the English department at UCSB since 2006. Apart from publishing essays on literature, film, postcolonial criticism and theory in journals such as Screen, boundary 2, The Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and in several anthologies, Ghosh’s first monograph on globalization, literary markets, and the political imagination of South Asian writing in English, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP), appeared in 2004. She has also co-edited a volume of critical essays, Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film ( Garland, 1997). Her second book, Corporeal Apertures: the Lives of Global Icons (forthcoming Duke UP, 2009), is aimed at rethinking (iconoclastic) dismissals of icons as overexposed mass mediatized commodities. As she completes Corporeal Apertures , Ghosh has started a third book-length project, The Great Vanishing: The Spectral Modern in South Asia. Her work on South Asian environmental documentary film has brought important insights to UCSB’s Literature and Environment initiative.

Cheryll Glotfelty is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She specializes in ecocriticism and theory, environmental literature, Western American literature, Nevada studies, and women's literature. Her publications include the now classic Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), which she co - edited with Harold Fromm. She also has authored numerous articles, including “Old Folks in the New West: Surviving Change and Staying Fit in The Misfits” in Western American Literature (2002), “Spiritual Testing in the Nuclear West” in Literature and Belief (2001), “Literary Place Bashing, Test Site Nevada” in the collection Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001), and “Cold War, Silent Spring: The Trope of War in Modern Environmentalism” in the collection And No birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (2000). Her newest book, Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (U of Nevada Press, 2008) is forthcoming.

Carl Gutiérrez-Jones is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1990. He served as department Chair from 2001-2004. He is currently the Director of the Center for Chicano Studies at UCSB. He pursued his undergraduate degree in English and American literature at Stanford University and his Ph.D. at Cornell University. His interests include American studies; Chicano studies; contemporary fiction; critical race studies and the culture of human rights. He is the author of Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury (2001), Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Narrative and Legal Discourse (1995), as well as numerous articles on literature, film, legal studies and cultural theory. He has also served as the Principal Investigator of a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2000-2005). Professor Gutiérrez-Jones is currently at work on a book that examines the literature of human rights.  

Giles Gunn is a Professor of English and of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and current Chair of the Global and International Studies Program. With Professor Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Professor Gunn founded the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center at UCSB. Professor Gunn received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1967, and his central interests include American literature; literary theory and criticism; American cultural and religious studies; global literature and culture; literature and religion; and literature and philosophy. He is the author of several books, including F.O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (1975); The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination (1979); The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (1987); Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (1992); and Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (2001). He has also edited several volumes and authored many, many essays on American and modern literature, global studies, ethics, critical theory, and intellectual and cultural theory. He is currently at work on a book entitled Ideas to Die For: Reconfiguring the Human in a World of Global Terror.

George Handley is Professor of Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. His interests are Literatures of the Americas, ecocriticism and ecotheology. Handley is a comparatist by training, focusing on the literatures of the Americas, and has published two books on inter-American themes. The first, Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000), is a study of the representation of slavery and family history in novels from the U.S. and the Caribbean. The second, New World Poetics (2007), is an environmental critique of the imagination of nature in the poetry of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. He also co-edited two books, Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005) and Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment (2006).

Judith Hicks is a graduate student in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her areas of interest include British and Anglophone literatures after 1900, modernism, gender and cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, environmental criticism, theories of representation and new media. She was the Literature and the Environment Graduate Colloquium, graduate-student coordinator for 2007-08.

Hsuan Hsu is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.His interests include: U.S. Literature, Asian American literature, cultural geography, critical race theory, visual culture, environmental justice, and psychoanalysis. Hsu’s work focuses on nineteenth-century U.S. literature, theories of racialization, and relationships between aesthetics and social space. He is author of several articles in journals such as American Literary History and Arizona Quarterly and is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Scales of Identification: Geography, Affect, and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. The book examines how literary discourses of domesticity, regionalism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism helped produce, manage, and critique communities of different types and scales during a period marked by increasing flows of migrant bodies, global commodities, and both imperial and domestic violence.

Esther Lezra is Assistant Professor in the Program for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California of San Diego in 2005 and was awarded a two-year Fellowship from the University of California Office of the President under the mentorship of Susan Gillman and George Lipsitz. She has published in the journals Dissidences: A Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and has an article in African Diasporas: Ancestors, Migrations and Boundaries, a collection edited by Robert Cancel and Winifred Woodhull. She specializes in the literary and cultural study of the Caribbean, Europe and North Africa from the eighteenth century to the present. Her book project explores questions of memory and forgetting in the multilingual archive of transatlantic revolutions and the submerged knowledges of Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories.

George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies at UCSB, where he studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. He has authored and edited numerous articles and books, including A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (1988), Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Focus of Place (1997), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998), American Studies in a Moment of Danger (2001), and Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (2001). Lipsitz received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Wisconsin and has been active in struggles for fair housing and educational equity. With Professor Clyde Woods, Professor Lipsitz sponsored the innovative Race, Space, and Power Critical Issues Series at UCSB in 2007-8.

Timothy Morton is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. His Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007) has been translated into Chinese. He is also the author of The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2009), and over fifty essays on ecology, literature, food and eating, literary theory, and philosophy, including “Queer Ecology” (PMLA, forthcoming).  

Marko Pelijhan is an Associate Professor at UC Santa Barbara and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Art and the Media Arts & Technology graduate program. A theatre and radio director by profession, he cofounded the Ljudmila digital media lab in Slovenia and is active in numerous tactical media communities. His work has been featured in published contemporary art anthologies (Fresh Cream, Art Tommorow) and extensively online and has been installed internationally including the Venice, Gwangju and Johannesburg Biennials, Documenta, Ars Electronica, ISEA, Manifesta, and numerous other exhibitions and museums, in Europe, Asia and the US among them P.S.1 Moma and the New Museum in New York. In 2000 he received the special Medienkunst prize at the ZKM in Karlsruehe. He currently serves on the strategic council for information society of the Republic of Slovenia and is active in the Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research initiative, coordinating and flight directing microgravity and space-art related experiments.

Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Penley’s major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies and author of numerous articles. Her most recent work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender, co-edited with Treichler and Cartwright. Her collaborative art projects include "MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee" and "Biospheria: An Environmental Opera," on which she was co-librettist. Professor Penley has been the driving force behind UCSB’s Environmental Media Initiative and is co-director of the prestigious Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media. 

Blaine Pope is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the MA Global and International Studies (MAGIS) program at UC Santa Barbara. Currently he is the program leader in the Fielding/UCSB MAGIS internship program, which is an on-line format that combines Fielding's developing distance learning programs and UCSB's global studies curriculum. As an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the MPA program in Environmental Science and Policy, Earth Institute at Columbia University he taught workshops in environmental policy and administration at the school of International and Public Affairs. Professor Pope's theoretical emphasis focuses on the analysis of large-scale global historical processes and their influence on modern human and organizational systems, which is complimented by his additonal background in environmental policy studies focusing on the international political-economy of energy resources. He is currently working on his book entitled Terracentrism: A New Way to View Energy Systems, A New Way to View the World System.

Jenny Price is an author and environmental historian. Her publications include Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (Basic Books, 2000) and essays in the anthologies Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995), Land of Sunshine: The Environmental History of Greater Los Angeles (2002), and The Nature of Nature: New Essays from America’s Finest Writers on Nature (Harvest Books, 1995). She is also frequently published in L.A. Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Audubon, and The New York Times. She was a 2005-6 Guggenheim Fellow and a two-time NEH Fellow and has been a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women since 1998. She is currently working on the forthcoming book 13 Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.

John-Michael Rivera is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Creative Director of The Amatl Project. He is a published poet and essayist. His last book, The Emergenceof Mexican America, was published by NYU Press in 2006. He is currently working on a mixed genre project entitled, Things Unfound-A Lyric Archive.  

Teresa Shewry received her Ph.D. from the Literature Program at Duke University in May 2008, and will start as an Assistant Professor of English at UCSB in July 2008. Her research and teaching interests include: Pacific and Pacific Rim literatures; ecocriticism, environmental studies, and political ecology; indigenous literatures; and theories of hope, possibility, and utopia. She is currently revising her dissertation, Possible Ecologies: Re-Imagining Literature, Nature, and Hope in the Pacific, for publication.

Erin Somerville is an Assistant Professor with the Literature and Environment Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her Ph.D., completed at the University of Warwick in the UK, provides green readings of Caribbean literature and examines the possible methodologies for postcolonial ecocriticism. Erin’s research interests include ideas of global ecocriticism and the environmental potential of travel writing (or lack thereof), and her latest article, which examines the environmental implication of postcolonial linguistic theory, appears in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

Nicole Starosielski is a graduate student in Film and Media Studies at UCSB currently working on a dissertation project on media technologies and representations of underwater spaces. She is interested in undersea cables, underwater technologies of vision, popular and scientific representations of underwater spaces, underwater animation, and immersive environments. She has worked for and been affiliated with the Transliteracies project, the Carsey-Wolf for Film, TV, and New Media's Environmental Media Initiative, and the Center for Information, Technology and Society. She has also had experience in media production and recently created the GreenScreen environmental media production program. She received her BA in Cinema-Television and English from the University of Southern California in 2005.

Julie Sze is an Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis as well as the director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis' John Muir Institute for the Environment. Sze’s research areas are race, class, gender and the environment, the environmental justice movement, urban environmentalism and environmental health and has published numerous articles in these areas. Her 2006 book from MIT Press, Noxious New York, analyzes the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the larger context of privatization, deregulation, and globalization. It won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book published in American Studies. Professor Sze is currently at work on an interdisciplinary study looking at the intersections between racialization, consumption and environmentalism.

Volker M. Welter is an Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Volker M. Welter studied architecture at the Technische Universität Berlin and received his Ph.D. in history of architecture from the University of Edinburgh. He has worked as architectural historian in Berlin, in Scotland (University of Edinburgh and Strathclyde University, Glasgow), and in England (University of Reading). He was the 1998-2000 Recipient of a Senior Research Grant, Getty Grant Program, Los Angeles. Since 2003, he directs the undergraduate emphasis Architecture and Environment at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, UCSB. During the Academic Year 2007-8, he received a senior fellowship of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. His research focuses on Western architecture and urbanism since the late 19th century, especially the interactions between architectural, philosophical, sociological, and environmental thought.

Louise Westling is a Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her current research focuses on ecophenomenology and literature, animality, and embodiment and language.  A related activity of hers is herding sheep with Australian Kelpies. Her most recent conference presentation was “The Human/Animality Dance of Sheep Herding,” which draws upon Vicki Hearne and Donna Haraway but extends their considerations with the phenomenological attention to language of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Professor Westling is known as one of the founders of environmental criticism and author of numerous articles in addition to the path-breaking ecocritical book The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (1998).

Clyde Woods is a Professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Professor Woods earned his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA and has taught at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the regional organization of poverty, power, race, and culture in the United States. His first book, Development Arrested examined these relationships in the rural Mississippi Delta and his upcoming study will address the role these social forces played in the construction of Black Los Angeles, from 1781 to the present. Another research area focuses on the philosophical and analytic contributions of Blues, Jazz, and Hip Hop. As part of this work, he recently co-edited Black Geographies and the Politics of Place with Katherine McKittrick. Finally, Professor Woods has initiated two long-term-research projects based in the Department. The first examines and supports the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans. The second project is designed to create a network of community members and scholars who are both studying Black Los Angeles and developing innovative policy solutions.  

Kim Yasuda is a Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara and specialilizes in spatial arts and sculpture.Yasuda's site-specific installations incorporate a range of media to activate both interior exhibition and outdoor public space. Her three-dimensional works investigate the relationship between identity and location within the modern landscape. Her current investigations of the spatial realm center on ways in which creative practices influence social transformation. Her work has been presented in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Canada) Camerawork Gallery (London); the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York); The Whitney Museum of American Art (Connecticut) and MIT List Gallery (Boston). She has been the recipient of visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, US/Japan Foundation, Howard Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation in Sculpture and Anonymous was a Woman Foundation. Her commissions include public projects throughout California, including subway facilities for the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Los Angeles and permanent public installations for the Holllywood Redevelopment Agency. Yasuda was commissioned to produce a permanent public installation for the city of San Jose, commemorating the life and work of Mexican American activist/scholar, Ernesto Galarza (1908-1984). She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Southern California.

Michael Ziser is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. His scholarly fields are American literature before the Civil War; American nature writing through the present day; ecocritical theory; and Anglophone settlement literature (Canada, Australia, South Africa). Recent publications include Dictionary of Literary Biography entries on early American naturalists Thomas Nuttall, Constantine Rafinesque, and Alexander Wilson (2005); a reconsideration of Walden's mode (Nineteenth Century Prose, 2004); and an inquiry into very early American writing about tobacco (William and Mary Quarterly, 2005). Professor Ziser’s current work includes an anthology of American writing about birds, an essay on the possible greening of evangelical Christianity, research into the literary uses of native American food crops along the 17th and 18th century Atlantic seaboard, and revision of a monograph on the reciprocal influence of American environmental and literary history before the Civil War.