Scholar of the Month

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for April 2022 is Steven Swarbrick. 

Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, specializing in early modern literature, literary and cultural theory, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?

When I began graduate school in 2009, animal studies and posthumanism were ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for March 2022 is Sladja Blazan. 

Sladja Blazan is currently a lecturer at Bard College Berlin. Her areas of research include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, critical refugee studies, and migration.

How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?

I feel like I have been working within ecocriticism without knowing it for a long time. Since early on in my academic work, I have felt the pressing need for a conceptual reorientation. It was mainly studies that came ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for February 2022 is Will Lombardi. 

Will Lombardi is Professor of English at Feather River College in the Northern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. His projects support environmental protections in the watershed and region he calls home.

How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?

Ha! I grew up hunting and fishing on the California Delta. When I was 16 I saw a book with geese on the cover at a Contra Costa County library book sale ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for January 2022 is Victoria Saramago. 

Victoria Saramago is an assistant professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2021).

How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities? 

I started thinking from an ecocritical perspective before I actually knew that ecocriticism and the environmental humanities existed. I was completing my MA degree in Brazil at the time and ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for December 2021 is Siobhan Carroll.

Siobhan Carroll is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. A scholar and an author of speculative fiction, her work focuses on the environmental imaginaries of early nineteenth-century Britain.

How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?

I’ve always been interested in vulnerable ecosystems. In my first book project, this interest translated into an attempt to understand how scientific exploration helped imaginatively construct environments like the Arctic. At ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for November 2021 is Stacey Balkan. 

Stacey Balkan is Assistant Professor of Environmental Literature and Humanities at Florida Atlantic University where she also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the University’s Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Initiative. She is co-editor of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere (Penn State Press, 2021) and author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India (West Virginia University Press, 2022) as well as numerous essays on energy ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for October 2021 is Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. 

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College. His research and teaching combine literary criticism, cultural studies, and sociology to examine the cultural and political dimensions of climate change, with a focus on climate justice.

How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?

I started my PhD in American Studies in 2007 and became interested in writing about the expectations, anxieties, and desires around peak oil, which were ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for September 2021 is Rebecca “Baker” Baker. 

Rebecca “Baker” Baker (they/she) is an English PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are broadly interested in cultural constructions of speculative scientific discourses – including science fiction – with a focus on decolonial worldbuilding, climate justice, multispecies ecologies, and radical utopian imaginaries. Their work is situated at the intersections of the environmental humanities, contemporary science fiction, critical infrastructure studies, and feminist STS; their current project focuses speculative, anti-imperialist ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for August 2021 is Emily Roehl.

Emily Roehl is an energy humanities scholar and artist whose work has most recently appeared in Environmental History, Jump Cut, and Southern Cultures. Over the past two years, she has organized a series of events on energy justice, place-based research-creation, and lower-carbon research methods. Roehl is a Lecturer in the Honors College at Texas State University and the co-founder of artist book publisher Mystery Spot Books.

How did you become interested in studying ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for July 2021 is James Wachira. 

James Wachira is a Kenyan PhD student at the Bayreuth Graduate School of African Studies whose doctoral research is about non*human matterings in selected Kenyan eco-texts. He is the author of “Animal Praise Poetry and the Samburu Desire to Survive” in Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms (ed. Fiona Moolla) and “Wangari Maathai’s environmental Afrofuturist imaginary in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi” in Critical Studies in Media Communication (2020).

How did you become interested ...