Affiliation
Department of English and the Institute of Environment & Sustainability, UCLA
Website
Bio
Ursula K. Heise holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is co-founder and current Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities; contemporary environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Vietnam; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave. She is also producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link. Her most recent book, a co-edited essay collection on Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, will be published in 2023. She is currently at work on a book entitled Reclaiming Ecotopia: Science Fiction and Environmental Futures.
“HWK Talk on the Anthropocene with Bernd M. Scherer of “The Anthropocene Project” in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Deutsches Museum, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam. [January 2013]
“The Database and the Ecological Imagination of the Planet” lecture at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Australia. [August 2012]
