ASLE Spotlight 2021, Episode 4: Identity and Place
This episode was recorded Friday, June 11, 2021. Guest Charles Pigott gratefully acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship) and the Isaac Newton Trust.
Co-Hosts: Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Gisela Heffes
Featured Guests/Works:Scott Edward Anderson, Azorean Suite: A Poem of the Moment/Suite Açoriana: Um Poema do Momento
“One can be born on an island in two ways,” wrote the poet and novelist Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto. “From the body of a woman or from the radiance of sensibility.” In this bilingual, book-length poem, Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana, ...
ASLE Spotlight 2021, Episode 3: A Sense of Urgency
This episode was recorded Friday, May 14, 2021
Co-Hosts: April Anson, Rahul Mukherjee
Featured Guests/Works:Hsuan L. Hsu, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics
Smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists ...
ASLE Spotlight 2021, Episode 2: Water Works
This episode was recorded on Friday, April 16, 2021
Co-Hosts: Bethany Wiggin, Melody Jue
Featured Guests/Works:Steve Mentz, Ocean
The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the more than human world. Human engagements with the world’s ocean can be destructive, as with today’s deluges of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience. From ancient ...
ASLE Spotlight 2021, Episode 1: Human/Non-human Relations
This episode was recorded on Friday, March 19, 2021
Co-Hosts: Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Heather Swan
Featured Guests/Works:Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
World of Wonders is the New York Times bestselling collection of illustrated nature essays celebrating the way plants and animals can teach, support, and inspire us, and about the lessons learned growing up as an Asian American woman. The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to ...