ASLE News

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) are excited to announce that they will hold their next conference jointly in Portland, Oregon on July 9-12, 2023 at the Oregon Convention Center.  The theme of the conference will be “Reclaiming the Commons.”  This event will offer opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, networking and professional development with a variety of sessions sponsored by both organizations.  Call for proposals from ASLE is below, and from ...

Thursday, October 20, 2022 2pm PT / 5pm ET Via Zoom

Please join us on Zoom for our third and final 2022 professional development workshop for ASLE graduate students. This workshop will focus on careers for environmental humanists both outside of academia and academic-adjacent positions. Participants will hear from fellow graduate students as well as Ph.D.s about the work they do, skills from their degree used in their current position, tips and strategies for preparing ...

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) is a nonprofit professional association with a dynamic membership and one dedicated, part-time professional staff member. ASLE thrives because of the commitment of its members to carrying out our work. ASLE invites you as a member to sustain vital work and to shape our future by considering serving in an elected or appointed position.

The next several years involve implementing a new Strategic Plan, while also responding creatively and flexibly to the ongoing duress ...

The reflection that follows is an assembly of voices representing members of the planning committee, panel moderators, field trip organizers, and more who contributed to the “Watersheds” Symposium that took place from June 24-26 at the University of Delaware. Feel free to read sequentially or to wade around at random! Our thanks to the attendees, sponsors, and staff whose sundry contributions made the symposium run smoothly—and to Amy McIntyre, especially, for her directorship. Over three days, we “seize[d] upon the potential that watersheds ...

Judges have announced the winners of the 2022 ASLE Book Awards. The awards, in the categories of ecocriticism and environmental creative writing, have been given biennially to recognize excellence in the field. The 2021 awards were postponed to 2022 due to the pandemic. This year, because of the delay and the high number of excellent submissions, two winners have been chosen in each category.

Congratulations also to our short-listed authors, read more about their excellent books via this post.

Luz at Midnight by Marisol Cortez. ...

In response to the repeal of Roe v. Wade, ASLE: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment affirms its support of reproductive and sexual rights, health rights and justice, marriage equality, and freedom of gender and sexual identity. ASLE condemns all movements that suppress reproductive freedom for political ends. We call attention to the risk that the Supreme Court will use this same logic to overthrow the rights to contraception, marriage equality, and freedom of gender expression. This logic reflects the way ...

by Stephen Siperstein, Choate Rosemary Hall

After a prolonged Covid-19 hiatus, the Environmental Literature Institute (ELI) returned in June 2022 to Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. Supported by ASLE, Orion Magazine, and Milkweed Press, ELI is a professional development institute for educators of all levels who are interested in incorporating Environmental Humanities pedagogy into their classrooms, programs, or institutions. This summer, twenty-seven educators from around the U.S., Canada, and Turkey and from a wide range of teaching contexts—public, private, middle school, high school, ...

The ASLE subvention and translation grant committee has announced the five ASLE member projects that have been awarded grants for 2022. We would like to thank the committee members who completed this challenging process of reviewing 30 abstracts: Heather Sullivan (chair), David Taylor, Hannes Bergthaler, and Lennie Amores. Please read more about their innovative projects below.

The real and imagined disappearance of coastal terrains and ecosystems in California has given rise to new anxieties and polities that approach ...

ISLE 29.2 (Summer 2022) has just been published, and is chock full of critical and creative content to add to your summer reading!  It features the work of five previous ASLE Graduate Student Papers Award winners: Emery Jenson, Tori Bush, and Esthie Hugo (2021 virtual conference), Heidi Amin-Hong (2019), and Kristin Ferebee (2017).

Also included in this quarter’s volume are ecocritical articles by Greta Gaard, Harri Salovaara, Heather Duncan, James Perrin Warren, Rita Elizabeth Risser, Dani Redd, Robert Myers, Susan Poursanati and Aria Farmani, ...