We are pleased to introduce ISLE‘S two new Associate Editors, Christina Gerhardt and Jennifer Westerman. The journal is instituting this new editorial model to help ISLE continue to grow and evolve. They were chosen from a deep pool of excellent candidates to fill these new positions, and will begin their work with the journal on July 1, 2018.  Associate Editors will serve for two years and have the opportunity to apply to become Editor at the end of that time.

Christina Gerhardt is Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, Film and German Studies at the University of Hawaii. She is the author of Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise and the editor of Climate Change, Hawaii and the Pacific.

Professor Gerhardt brings a wealth of editorial experience to the position of Associate Editor at ISLE. She currently serves as a member of the PMLA (Publication of the MLA) Advisory Committee (2016-2019) and on the Editorial Board for the Environmental Humanities series published by Routledge and on the Editorial Board for the journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. She was also a founding editorial board member of Transit – the first on-line journal devoted to the intersection of German studies and migration.

She has over a decade of experience in peer reviewing book proposals and manuscripts for an international range of university presses and also regularly reviews articles for over a dozen peer-reviewed academic journals. She has (co-)edited three books and guest edited two special issues of journals.

Professor Gerhardt has held fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin and Columbia University and taught previously at the University of California at Berkeley.

Her writing has been published in the journals Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Cineaste, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, German Studies Review, Humanities, Mosaic, New German Critique and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and in the edited volumes My Ocean Guide and Water: An Atlas.

She is honored and humbled to have been selected to serve as Associate Editor of ISLE and looks forward to working with members of ASLE and on working to solicit submissions at the cutting edge research on the environment and literature, and in related fields and disciplines.

Jennifer Westerman is Associate Professor in the Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

An ASLE member for sixteen years, she holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno,where she served two years as Assistant Book Review Editor for ISLE.

She is co-editor of Working on Earth: Class and Environmental Justice (2015) and co-author of several articles examining social justice knowledge gaps, empathy as an antecedent to social justice, and materialism and environmental values in education for sustainable development.

She teaches classes in environmental humanities; literature and environment; environmental justice and sustainability; critical development studies; and labor, social justice, and sustainable development.

Westerman looks forward to supporting the journal’s commitment to interdisciplinarity engagement with ecological issues on a global scale and the cultural work of literature in various contexts.