ASLE Welcomes New Professional Liaison Coordinator and Sustainability Officer

ASLE is pleased to announce that we have new officers in two appointed positions: Professional Liaison Coordinator (PLC) and Sustainability Officer. We want to thank Heather Sullivan for many dedicated years as PLC, and for her ongoing work as Grants Coordinator. The Sustainability Officer is a new position; while we have always strived to incorporate sustainability goals into everything ASLE does, and will continue to do so, the time has come to dedicate specific efforts and labor to achieve our goals. Please join us in welcoming these new officers to our leadership team!

 

Professional Liaison Coordinator

Beatriz Rivera-Barnes is Associate Professor of Spanish at Penn State University. She is the co-author (with Jerry Hoeg) of Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009 and the author of The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures, Lexington Books, 2021. Rivera-Barnes is also the author of numerous articles on Hispanic ecocriticism published in scholarly journals and of five novels and a collection of short stories. 

 

 

Sustainability Officer

Rebecca Evans is an assistant professor of English and contributing faculty member in Environmental Studies and Race and Ethnicity Studies at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college in Georgetown, Texas. She researches and teaches 20th and 21st century multi-ethnic American literature and culture, with particular interests in social and environmental justice movements, the environmental humanities, and speculative fiction and film. Her current book project, provisionally titled Genre Frictions, explores how emerging structural understandings of violence shaped both American fiction and American social movements from the 1960s to the present. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, ASAP/Journal, Science Fiction Studies, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, and An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press). She also writes for the Science Fiction section of the Los Angeles Review of Books and is featured in conversation with Ruth Ozeki on a spring 2022 episode of the podcast Novel Dialogue. She received her PhD in English from Duke University in 2016 and earned a graduate certificate in Climate Adaptation from North Carolina State University in 2022.