Scholar of the Month

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for June 2024 is Alison Maas.

Alison Maas is a PhD. Candidate in English with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. Her work has appeared in The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English, Atlantic Studies, and Comparative American Studies. She is creator and producer of the podcast series “California’s Eroding Coastline” funded by the Bilinski Fellowship at Bodega Bay Marine Lab, co-editor of the Searchable Sea Literature website run by Williams Mystic, ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for May 2024 is Michelle Yates.

Michelle Yates is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Columbia College Chicago. Situated within ecomedia studies, her research utilizes a feminist and queer ecologies approach to examine the relationship between masculinity, nostalgia, and environmentalism as represented in popular Hollywood climate fiction (cli-fi) narratives. She has written on films such as Soylent Green (1973), WALL-E (2008), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Snowpiercer (2013), and Interstellar (2014). Michelle also produces scholarship in the ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for April 2024 is Paul Merchant.

Paul Merchant is an Associate Professor in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol, UK, where he also co-directs the Centre for Environmental Humanities. His research explores the intersections of environment and culture across the region, with a particular focus on Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Ocean to Come: Pacific Futures in Chile and Peru, which examines the significance of ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for March 2024 is Elizabeth Carolyn Miller.

Liz Miller is a Professor of English and Interim Chair of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature of Britain and the British Empire, ecocriticism and environmental studies, gender studies, and media studies. She is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton, 2021). Extraction Ecologies received ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for February 2024 is Kent Linthicum.

Kent Linthicum is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. He earned his Ph.D. from Arizona State University and was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology before accepting his current position. His work focuses on coal in nineteenth-century anglophone cultures, especially the relationship between industrialization and slavery. Dr. Linthicum’s work has appeared in Environmental Humanities, Studies in English Literature, and ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for January 2024 is Isabel Lane.

My name is Isabel Lane, and I’m a scholar and teacher working at the intersection of literature, technology, incarceration, and environment. I’m currently a Lecturer in the Harvard College Writing Program, where I teach topic-based writing courses and am glad to have the relative freedom to work on collaborative projects, nonacademic writing, and scholarship outside of my original field of training.

I received my Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale, where research ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for December 2023 is Lisa Blackmore.

Lisa Blackmore is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex. After obtaining her Ph.D. in Latin American Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College in 2011, she taught at universities in Venezuela and the United Kingdom and was Postdoctoral Researcher on the project “Modernity and the Landscape in Latin America: Politics, Aesthetics, Ecology” at the University of Zurich from 2014-17. Moving between practice and research in the environmental humanities, ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for November 2023 is Lucien Darjeun Meadows.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows was born in Virginia and raised in West Virginia. A Ph.D. graduate from the University of Denver (June 2023), his Ph.D. dissertation studies the queer ecology of clouds in nineteenth-century British poetics, so as to show how lyrical writing on clouds, within works from poems to scientific treatises, destabilizes human subject/environmental object hierarchies and instead offers subject/subject relationships.

Across his interests in environmental studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and working-class poetics, as ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for October 2023 is Serena Ferrando.

Serena Ferrando is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and Italian at Arizona State University. Her current book project, tentatively titled Channeling Nature: Water, Plants and Animals in Italian Poetry, is an eco-digital study of water and the nonhuman in contemporary Italian poetry. The book is a case study for the need to harness the enduring might of poetry to generate, sustain, and promote collective narratives for the protection of nonhuman environments in urban ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for September 2023 is Carolina Sánchez.

Carolina Sánchez is a Colombian writer and researcher. She is one of the editors of the Latin American Platform of Environmental Humanities. She is also a Fulbright scholar and PhD candidate in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at Rutgers University. She works on political transitions in Contemporary Latin America, representations of spaces and belonging in visual narratives, poetics, and politics of space. She uses conceptual tools from Ecocriticism, Continental Philosophy, and Literature. ...