Scholar of the Month

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 ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for June 2021 is April Anson. 

Dr. April Anson is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University, where she writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities and American studies, paying particular attention to Indigenous studies and political theory. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in boundary 2, Resilience, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and others.

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

After teaching high school English and running what ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for May 2021 is Fernando Varela. 

Fernando Varela is currently finishing his doctoral degree in Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. He defended his dissertation with honors on April 1. His professional interests include hemispheric studies, critical race studies, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities. Starting August 2021, Fernando will be an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Texas Lutheran University (Seguin, TX).

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

In a way, my personal background ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for April 2021 is Addie Hopes.

Addie Hopes (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s an editorial assistant with Contemporary Literature and Managing Editor of Edge Effects.

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

I grew up in rural Ohio playing in the woods with my cousins, hanging out in the barn with the feral cats and horses, and climbing trees to read books where only the ...

ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for March 2021 is Fazila Derya Agis. 

Fazila Derya Agis is an adjunct online instructor at the University of the People who also enjoys her online volunteer job as she teaches refugees and many others who cannot afford high tuition fees around the globe. She has been working on ecolinguistics, environmental cultural anthropology, and environmental politics and history and is writing a monograph on animal and plant metaphors and beliefs in various cultures from an ecolinguistic perspective.

How did you ...