We are delighted to announce the themes and participants in our 2024-25 ASLE Spotlight series.
Each of our four ASLE Spotlight episodes will feature moderated conversations with ASLE members who have produced new critical and creative work in the environmental humanities. Episodes follow a theme, and highlight publicly engaged scholarship. They will be recorded for later viewing, and posted to ASLE Spotlight and to our Spotlight Channel on YouTube.
Registration is free but required for the live episodes. Priority will be given to ASLE members, but all are welcome to sign up and will be accommodated if space is available; a waitlist will be kept as needed. Links to registration for each episode, and a list of the creators/authors featured, is below. More details on the guests will be added soon!
EPISODE 1: EXTRACTION
Friday, October 18, 2024
1:30-2:30 pm Eastern Time
Co hosts: Sharae Deckard and Kate Huber
FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:
Nathaniel Otjen, Mining for the Climate
Mining for the Climate is a podcast series that examines the impacts of domestic critical mineral extraction. The series considers how new and old forms of mining are fueling the energy transition and what the consequences are of a more mining-dependent society on humans, other beings and the climate.
In addition to offering a platform for environmental storytelling and research, Mining for the Climate is a pedagogical project. Undergraduate students learn an array of skills, including how to use audio and video recording equipment, how to interview people and how to produce audio narratives. At the same time, we are working to bring these stories to primary and secondary classrooms where they can further inspire and impact.
Nathaniel Otjen is Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Environmental Studies at Ramapo College. Before this, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. An interdisciplinary environmental humanist, he specializes in multispecies justice theory, energy humanities, and literary and cultural studies. He is currently writing his first book, Entangled Lives: Multispecies Selves, Justice, and Narratives, and co-directing an ongoing project called Mining for the Climate. In addition, he is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue in the minnesota review on “Multispecies Justice and Narrative.” His published research can be read in Environmental Humanities, Animal Studies Journal, ISLE, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, among others.
Petra Kuppers, Diver Beneath the Street
True crime meets ecopoetry at the level of the soil, bringing together life and death. A decaying psychogeography unfurls the landscapes of the 1967–69 Michigan Murders, the 2019 Detroit serial killer, and the COVID-19 lockdown in this visceral poetry collection. Author, performance artist, and disability culture activist Petra Kuppers dissects traces of violence in the richness of the soil while honoring lost community members. Dynamic and somatic poems traverse the realms of urban space, wild rivers, and the hinterlands of suburbia, glimpsing the decay of bodies, houses, carpets, hair, and bones by way of ecopoetry.
Fereshteh Toosi, School of Oil and Water
School of Oil and Water is a mail-order kit to examine your relations with petroleum through a collection of artist-made objects and activities. This contemplative correspondence school takes the form of an artist book packaged in a box. Our curriculum explores these guiding questions:
- Who is oil and what does oil desire from us?
- Is oil merely a fuel source and material for humans, or could it have other reasons to exist?
- How can we practice relating to petroleum as a vibrant ancestor?
Fereshteh Toosi is an artist and educator whose work involves encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry. They produce immersive performances, sculptures, films, poetry, games, and interactive experiences.
Louis Kirk McAuley, The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704-1894
This book invites readers to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, it offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature, highlighting the heterarchical nature of empire building.
Louis Kirk McAuley is a Professor of English at Washington State University, a US-UK Fulbright scholar, and the author of Print Technology in Scotland and America, 1740–1800, and numerous articles.
EPISODE 2: LOCALIZING THE GLOBAL
Friday, November 15, 2024
1:00-2:00 pm Eastern Time
Co-hosts: Laura Barbas-Rhoden and Amanda M. Smith
FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:
Catherine Diamond, Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project
The Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project (KETEP) in Southeast Asia creates new plays from local traditional and modern sources to deal with current environmental problems. It works with communities, student groups, and professional performers to produce an entertaining show in the local language that addresses an issue of concern to the audience–overfishing, deforestation, plastic waste, and wildlife poaching.
Catherine Diamond is the playwright/director of KETEP. A professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taiwan, she wrote Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres.
John MacNeill Miller, The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science
Ecology, economics, and realist fiction seem like opposed modes of thought today, but they all rely on a form of narrative storytelling Miller calls “the ecological plot.” This book charts the evolution of ecological plots over the last two centuries to underscore what unites these fields and to urge their reconciliation. Miller’s book reveals why our most sophisticated efforts to explain humanity’s relationship to nature have been segregated into different disciplines and makes an argument for the importance of bringing these separate ways of understanding the world back together as a crucial step toward solving the environmental, economic, and ethical problems of the present.
John MacNeill Miller is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College, where he teaches courses at the intersection of literature, science, and the environmental humanities.
Victoria Saramago (with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi), Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics
The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. This book was co-edited by Jens Andermann, Gabriel Giorgi and Victoria Saramago, and ideally the three co-editors would be present at the event.
Victoria Saramago is associate professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago. Jens Andermann is professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Gabriel Giorgi is professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University and researcher at CONICET (Argentina).
Malcolm Sen, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment
From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland’s island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic – this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.
Malcolm Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. He leads the university’s Environmental Humanities Initiative and is the co-chair of the Sustainability Strategy Working Group. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, migration, and race as they emerge in climate change discourse
EPISODE 3: CLIMATE JUSTICE
Friday, January 17, 2025
1:00-2:00 pm Eastern Time
Co-hosts: John Brannigan and Kyle Keeler
FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:
Jane Robbins Mize and Isabel Lane, Evacuation Plan
Evacuation Plan is a research-based graphic narrative (forthcoming from Vera) that follows two incarcerated men looking for answers about a nearby nuclear power plant. Through darkly comic visual storytelling, Evacuation Plan underscores how incarcerated folks are uniquely vulnerable to environmental crises and illuminates an often overlooked experience of environmental injustice.
The project is a collaboration between incarcerated and nonincarcerated scholars, writers, and artists: Jared Bozydaj, Adam Roberts, CM Campbell, David Pellow, Isabel Lane, and Jane Robbins Mize. Isabel Lane, Lecturer in the Harvard College Writing Program, and Jane Robbins Mize, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, are submitting this project on the group’s behalf.
Parisa Rinaldi, Coastal Community Resilience
Students in Rinaldi’s coastal community resilience class conducted community workshops and interviews that were compiled using ArcGIS storymaps. They presented their findings back to community members, along with a song and poem on rising waters featured on the story map. The lyrics and poem were inspired by interviews with coastal residents in Southern Maryland.
Parisa Nourani Rinaldi is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland whose work bridges environmental conservation, community resilience, and the arts in addressing climate challenges. Her research explores water science, democracy, and justice in Colombia’s extractive frontiers, as well as the resilience of fisherfolk in Colombia’s Atlantic and Pacific port cities navigating intersecting pressures of urbanization, climate change, and port development. Parisa holds a joint PhD in Development Studies from Universidad de los Andes and The University of British Columbia, and an MS in Geosciences from Georgia State University. During her seven years in Colombia, she taught at major universities, collaborated with artists and activists to create audiovisual narratives, and contributed to participatory action research projects supporting marginalized communities. At St. Mary’s, she integrates these experiences into her teaching and mentorship, fostering partnerships with coastal communities in the Chesapeake Bay and developing digital tools for storytelling and environmental advocacy.
Leanne Dunic, Wet
A book of prose and photography, Wet follows a transient Chinese American model who thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. Wet unravels complexities of social stratification, sexual privation, and environmental catastrophe.
Leanne Dunic is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist and author of transmedia projects such as To Love the Coming End, The Gift, and One and Half of You. Her most recent work is a lyric novel with photographs entitled Wet. She is the leader of the band The Deep Cove, the fiction editor at Tahoma Literary Review, and a teacher at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. Leanne is currently a PhD candidate at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and The University of the Fraser Valley’s 2025 Writer-in-Residence.
Kamala Platt, Environmental Justice Poetics
Environmental Justice Poetics is an interdisciplinary, comparative investigation of late 20th Century activist, artistic, literary, and academic discourse—expressive work promoting ecological justice, ending racism, and representing self and community through virtual realism—a cultural poetics of environmental justice. examines ecojustice in conjunction with social movement theories and expressive discourse.
Kamala Platt‘s poetry collections — Gravity Prevails (FlowerSong Press, 2022) Weedslovers: Ten Years in the Shadow of September (Finishing Line Press, 2014), On the Line (Wings Press, 2010), — document and exemplify a poetics of crisis, resistance, and resilience by chronicling manmade calamities and the persistence of hopeful acts in marginalized places. Dr. Platt teaches Creative Writing, Pen Project Prison Writing Internships, Environmental Justice Poetics and Chicana Poetry online for the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in Arizona State University’s New College. She tends native landscape, orchard and garden experiments in her yard and Garden of Good Trouble. A Black Mouth Cur named Bonnie Bo, several cats and chickens and a Mini Nubian named Perlita have been her main companions during the pandemic in her neighborhood on San Antonio’s Westside. She continues interdisciplinary art projects, ecojustice scholarship, and Arte Verde experiments, innovating sustainability with Rascuache processes. She serves her communities in conjunction with several nonprofit organizations for environmental-, climate-, and social justice. She keeps in touch with the Meadowlark Center and family in Kansas— zoom facilitates continued learning, poetry readings, and maintaining friendships, making new connections with seed savers, artists and activists.
EPISODE 4: REPRODUCING ANIMALITY
Friday, February 21, 2025
1:00-2:00 pm Eastern Time
Co-hosts: Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond and Kathryn Kirkpatrick
FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:
Jennie Case, We Are Animals
We Are Animals examines moments in Case’s life when her experience as a woman in twenty-first-century America came in conflict with her experience as a child-bearing mammal. From the surprising salve of parasocial interactions on baby forums to the not so surprisingly intertwined history of industrial dairy farming and wearable breast pumps, Case explores an array of realities that give historical and cultural context to the experience of motherhood.
The essays collected here offer a balm for women who have struggled in silence over childbirth trauma, conflicted responses to motherhood, or a deeply felt intuition that what their bodies needed as mothers did not match what society provided. They also offer a much needed, nuanced perspective for policymakers, activists, and medical professionals who continue to shape women’s experience of motherhood.
Jennifer Case is the author of We Are Animals: Essays on the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024) and Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in journals such as the Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, Literary Mama, and North American Review, while her scholarship can be found in the Journal of Creative Writing Studies and Assay. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com.
Sarah Giragosian, Mother Octopus
Mother Octopus (Middle Creek Press), co-winner of the Halcyon Prize, is animated by eco-poems that raise questions about the nature of human and animal appetites and the increasing levels of consumption that threaten the environment, while also exploring forms of resilience in the Anthropocene. In this manuscript, you will find poems inquiring into the forces and agencies (ie: gut flora, bacteria, toxins, and microorganisms) that impact animals and human animals in complex ways, yet may not even rise to the level of consciousness. In an era in which the global pandemic shaped discourse about animals, peoples, and environment (often in reductive ways), my manuscript seeks to deepen the conversation about how the crisis derives from our problematic relationships to animals and the environment, as well as the indiscriminate omnivorism that characterizes our age. Elegiac and yet critical of false consolation, Mother Octopus delves into the anxieties, violence, and pleasures of consumption (corporeal, economic, and societal) and its impacts on peoples, animals and environments.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish (winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), which she co-edited. She also wrote Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Tin House, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University of Albany-SUNY.
Ted Toadvine, The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology
The Memory of the World contends that our obsession with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future, misleading sustainability efforts and diminishing our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others.
Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and Professor of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in contemporary Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and recent French philosophy, and the philosophy of nature and environment. He is author of The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (Minnesota, 2024) and Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Northwestern, 2010), and has edited numerous titles, including Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Springer, 2020), The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Northwestern, 2007), and Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (SUNY, 2003). He co-directs the Contributions to Phenomenology Series with Springer.
Mandy-Suzanne Wong, The Tubercled-Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope
This project is an ongoing creative collaboration in honor of a freshwater mussel species, Epioblasma torulosa torulosa, that was stricken from the Endangered Species List in 2023. Conceived under the auspices of Jennifer Calkins’ project DELISTED, the Library of Hope involves twelve creators working in the literary arts, sculpture, photography, film, and outdoors.
Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a writer of fiction and essays. Her essay collection Listen, we all bleed was a 2022 ASLE Book Award finalist. Her novel The Box, published by Graywolf, was shortlisted for the 2023 US/Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize. Forthcoming in 2026 from Graywolf is her essay collection devoted to aquatic invertebrates, A Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl. Mandy-Suzanne’s prose piece “Notes from Underwater,” nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize by The Cincinnati Review, was written for her curatorial, collaborative project, The Tubercled-Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope.
