To amplify the scholarship, teaching, and activism that contingent faculty and independent scholars bring to our community, ASLE will host a series of online events in 2024 dedicated to the important and broad range of work contingent and independent scholars do.
- September 6th (1-2pm EDT) – Roundtable on public humanities by and for contingent and independent scholars.
- October 3rd (1-2pm EDT) – Roundtable and networking workshop for reading, writing, and research groups to support the professional development and research of contingent/independent scholars.
- November 1st (3-4pm EDT) – Roundtable on unionizing and funding strategies for those off the tenure clock.
Who are contingent faculty and why are we hosting these events?
Contingent scholars now comprise the majority of faculty in the USA. According to a 2023 report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 68% of higher education is now in the hands of contingent faculty. While employment benefits vary from institution to institution, contingent faculty do not have the promise of permanency from their institutions that tenure-track faculty do, even while they manage at least full-time teaching loads alongside service work. Notably, women and BIPOC scholars overrepresent contingent positions while underrepresenting tenure-track appointments. Moreover, as the number of tenure-track positions has declined, graduate-student positions have increased by 44% over the past two decades, suggesting that many currently researching dissertations will later work as contingent faculty or as independent scholars in alt-ac careers.
While we may certainly lament the working conditions and lack of institutional support many contingent and independent scholars endure, we cannot deny the important contributions they make and will continue to make to ecocriticism. We look forward to showcasing the work of these scholars in our upcoming online events.
We hope to see you at one or more of these online events! The details for each roundtable are below.
Public Humanities by and for Independent and Contingent Scholars
September 6, 2024
1-2pm EDT on Zoom
Featured speakers:
Aubrey Streit Krug is a writer, teacher, and researcher who studies human-plant relationships and connections between cultural and agricultural change. She is the director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at The Land Institute, a non-profit research organization. Aubrey holds a PhD in English and Great Plains Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work investigates literature and ecology, ethnobotany, pedagogy, transdisciplinary and participatory methods, and the sociocultural drivers and impacts of crop domestication and perennial grain agriculture. Relevant essay: “Crossing the Threshold into Prairie” in the Becoming Undisciplined cluster at ASAP/J
Crista Fiala is a co-producer of the documentary Watershed and the podcast series Common Ground: A Prairie Podcast. She is also an incoming Comparative Literature Master’s student at Dartmouth College with research interests in various mediums of multiethnic and environmental literature, whether textual, graphic, or cinematic. In 2024, she earned her BA in English, Spanish, and History at the University of Saint Joseph in Connecticut. Crista also has experience working on other PSA, signage, and documentary projects concerning the watersheds of the Connecticut River and its tributaries. She has covered stories about the D.C. environment and Latine art as an editorial intern and volunteered her translation abilities for organizations like the Mark Twain House & Museum. As Crista begins graduate school, she looks forward to continuing to pursue the environmental humanities inside and outside of academia. Some of her recent publications are:
- “Hartford & the West: Ocean Vuong and His Re-Generationof Samuel Colt’s Western Environment,” published last fall in Illuminate:The Undergraduate Journal of the Northeast Regional Honors Council
- “Artist and interpreter Marisela Rumberg finds common threads in her two careers,”published this spring on Hola Cultura
Dr. Joshua T. Anderson is the district conservation manager for the Walsh County Three Rivers Soil Conservation District. Formerly a professor of American literature and creative writing at a university in New England, Josh returned home to rural North Dakota in the winter of 2023 to help lead conservation efforts. Josh is the host of Common Ground: A Prairie Podcast and a co-producer of Watershed, a documentary film. Since February 2023, Josh has secured nearly 6 million dollars in conservation grants and over $100,000 in education and community outreach grants. He also oversees the conservation mentorship program, working with rural high school and college students to develop career skills in farming, ranching, and conservation. His recent work has appeared in North American Review, North Dakota Monitor, Iowa Capital Dispatch, and Mary Swander’s “Emerging Voices” Substack.
Dr. Matt Henry is a Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), where he works on energy justice initiatives and supports energy transition communities through various technical assistance programs. His research expertise includes just transition frameworks, environmental and climate justice, and the energy-water nexus. Prior to joining NREL he received his PhD at Arizona State University in English/Environmental Humanities and spent 4.5 years as a faculty member at the University of Wyoming, where he wrote his first book, Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (2023).
Links: https://x.com/DrJustFutures
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-henry-8822b863/
https://uwyo.academia.edu/MatthewHenry
NTT Networking and Professional Development
Thursday, October 3, 2024
1-2pm EDT on Zoom
Please join us for this roundtable of independent and contingent scholars who will share how they develop and maintain professional development networks and opportunities, thereby highlighting the unique paths NTT (Non-Tenure Track) careers can take.
Confirmed speakers:
Alison Turner grew up in the mountains of Colorado, where she learned to endure large amounts of time in inclement weather waiting for buses. Her creative work appears in Blue Mesa Review, Wordrunner eChapbooks, Little Patuxent Review, Meridian, and Bacopa Literary Review, among others, and her first collection of short stories, Defensible Spaces, was published by Torrey House Press in 2023. She is a 2022-2024 ACLS Leading Edge postdoctoral fellow in Jackson, Mississippi, where she coordinates a community-based oral history project and facilitates creative writing workshops with writers incarcerated at Parchman State Penitentiary.
Anthony Lioi is a professor of English at the Juilliard School in New York. A former president of ASLE, he is the author of Nerd Ecology (2016) and many essays on contemporary American literature and popular culture. His scholarship centers on the fields of contemporary American literature, ecocriticism, cultural studies, and rhetoric and composition. He is also a published poet, and sits on the editorial board of Green Letters and is a co-editor of the journal Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture.
Ellie Irons is an artist, scholar and educator living and working on Mohican land in current-day Troy, New York, USA. In December 2021, she completed a practice-based PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY), focused on forms of ecosocial art that cultivate plant-human solidarity. Currently she works as a community science educator and lab manager for NATURE Lab at the Sanctuary for Independent Media. Her most recent publication is the book Feral Hues: A Guide to Painting with Weeds (Publication Studio Hudson, 2023). Check out more of Ellie’s work on the following websites:
- Sanctuary For Independent Media – We use art, science and participatory action to promote social and environmental justice and freedom of creative expression.
- https://www.mediasanctuary.org/project/sanctuary-eco-art-trail/
- https://ellieirons.com/projects/feral-hues-book/
- https://nextepochseedlibrary.com/lawn/
- https://ellieirons.com/projects/feral-hues/
Juliana Chow is a diasporic writer, educator, scholar, and mother. She currently teaches at the University of Utah and directs the Ecology & Legacy minor at the Honors College and has published academic and creative writing. She is the ASLE Mentoring Program Co-Coordinator.
Getting Funding and Organizing for a More Secure Future as a Contingent Scholar
Friday, November 1, 2024
3-4pm EST on Zoom
This exciting lineup of scholars shares their experiences advocating for contingent scholars through faculty unions and acquiring funding without the institutional support of tenure.
Ruth M. McAdams is a Senior Teaching Professor in the English department at Skidmore College. She is the author of Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) as well as articles that have appeared or are forthcoming in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. She was one of the original organizers of Skidmore Faculty Forward, the Skidmore College NTT faculty union, SEIU Local200 United, established September 2022. Since then, she has served on the negotiating committee. As of press time, they are still negotiating toward their first collective bargaining agreement.
Mimi Winick, PhD, is Powell-Edwards Chair in Religion and the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her current book project on late Victorian theorists of religion and their invention of a secret history of feminist spirituality was supported by a 2023 ACLS Project Development Grant. From 2016-2024, she worked off the tenure-track at three different universities, including as a fellow in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and on the Transcendence and Transformation initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.
Eleanor Wakefield is a Senior Instructor of English and Composition at the University of Oregon. 
Her teaching and research interests include poetry and poetics, American literature, women’s poetry, formal verse, and Pacific Northwest literature. Her PhD in American poetry is from the University of Oregon. In her role as VP of Non-Tenure Track Instructional Faculty Affairs for the University of Oregon’s faculty union, United Academics of the University of Oregon, Eleanor helps pro-tem and career faculty improve their working conditions; in this role she has also worked with other academic unions and individuals interested in higher education union issues. Her other campus work includes directing the UO Composition Program’s Writing Lab and serving on department, University, and State committees to improve the educational experiences of students in and at Oregon and to improve working conditions for faculty. Eleanor’s work has appeared in The Hopkins Review and The Robert Frost Review.
