Observatory: North American

Joni Adamson is President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University. She is the Secretary General of the Humanities for the Environment Network and Director of the North American Observatory. She is the author and/or co-editor of American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (University of Arizona Press, 2001), The Environmental Justice Reader: (University of Arizona Press, 2002),m American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Ecology (Routledge, 2013), Keywords for Environmental Studies (New York University Press, 2016), Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies—Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (Routledge 2017) and Humanities for the Environment (Routledge 2017). She lectures internationally and has published over 80 articles, chapters, blogs and reviews. Her work has been supported by many awards and grants, including most recently, the 2019 Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. In 2012, she served as President of the world’s largest environmental humanities organization, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).

Jada Ach is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Arizona State University where she teaches in the Interdisciplinary Studies and Master of Liberal Studies programs. In 2019, Ach earned her Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of South Carolina, and her research often combines insights from literary studies, the desert humanities, and land management history. She is the author of Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925 (Texas Tech UP, 2021) and co-editor of Reading Aridity in Western American Literature (Lexington Books, 2020). Jada co-organizes the Inter/Desert Dialogues series at Arizona State University and is the Humanities Director for Science the Earth, an Arizona-based nonprofit organization that specializes in connecting community members with research scientists, interdisciplinary scholars, community leaders, and industry professionals.

Rimjhim Aggarwal is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University (ASU). Her research and teaching interests lie at the interface between sustainability science and international development. A central focus of her research has been on examining the links between globalization, resilience of social-ecological systems, and human well-being. Her most recent project on Activating Global Citizenship through the UN Sustainable Development Goals is funded through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She is also currently working on a multidisciplinary project funded by the National Science Foundation on Innovations in Food, Energy and Water Nexus. Together with Joni Adamson, Aggarwal co-led a PLuS Alliance collaborative project on “Humanities for the Anthropocene: Developing New Approaches to Knowledge, Engagement and Impact.” In past research, Aggarwal has examined the emerging conflicts in the framing of water as a human right as well as an economic, ecological and social good in rapidly urbanizing regions, with focus on Delhi, São Paulo and Johannesburg. Aggarwal has previously worked as a consultant for the World Bank and the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research on various projects related to sustainability, globalization and the world’s poor. In recognition of her efforts in “use-inspired research” and “community outreach,” she was awarded the ASU President’s Award for Sustainability. She is also a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award.

Julie Anand is Associate Professor of Photography in the School of Art and Senior Sustainability Scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Her projects, informed by a background in Ecology and Geology, often explore material culture, body/land relations and issues of interdependency/boundary.

One of the significant aspects I bring to this group of academics is providing artistic methodologies & processes to complement & represent the research findings to a mass multi-cultural audience. The goal and vision of my art is to elicit participation and deliver a philosophy of collaboration and cooperation. Themes include repurposing, beauty, resilience, biodiversity, sharing, composting, water harvesting, LFE (local food economy),urban gardening, social justice & reciprocity. This practice of socially engaged art, awakens our senses to the possible. It invites right brain thinking. It supports the necessary shift in how we think about and engage with the natural world. It is an art practice that empowers people. Change for the better happens when we tap into human emotion.  We become excited when we experience what the Earth produces and how delicious “homegrown” foods taste! AND, we become inspired, find a sense of purpose & reverence through our multi-sensory experiences with Art.

Currently, Joan is facilitating The Heritage Grain Trials at Clark Park Community Gardens in Tempe, AZ…a program  developed by the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, whose co-founders (Bill McDorman & Belle Starr) are based in Cornville, Az. This program  introduces  ancient grains, to be included as part of a comprehensive farming system that focuses on growing the highest  source of  caloric intake.  In addition, Joan’s “FoodintheAlley” recently added the LEHR Garden methodology. This food production system is regenerative;  using compostable materials to produce rich soil from the ground up. It grows food faster, seeking to provide a much needed solution to food deserts.

Robert Boschman is a professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is co-founder of the award-winning Under Western Skies biennial conference series on the environment held at Mount Royal from 2010 to 2016. A past president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada, Dr. Boschman specializes in ecological approaches to teaching American literature, with emphasis on the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. His monograph, In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Movement in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt, was published in 2009, and has been reviewed in journals internationally, including Anglia: A Journal of English Philology, ISLE, University of Toronto Quarterly, Choice, and The Goose. Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene (co-edited with Mario Trono) was published in 2014 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press; and On Active Grounds: Agency and Time in the Environmental Humanities will be published by WLUP in 2018. Boschman’s book about growing up in northern Saskatchewan, The Ride Along: A Memoir of Place, Family, and Intergenerational Trauma, is forthcoming from the University of Regina Press. He also collaborates with Bill Bunn in documenting the abandoned mining town of Uranium City on the north of Lake Athabasca–their co-authored, open-access article, “Nuclear Avenue: ‘Cyclonic Development’, Abandonment, and Relations in Uranium City, Canada” was published in Humanities in January 2018. Boschman’s work in environmental still photography can be viewed at robertboschman.com.

Matthew Burtner (www.matthewburtner.com) is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Music at the University of Virginia (www.virginia.edu) where he Co-Directs the Coastal Future Conservatory (http://www.coastalconservatory.org). He also Directs the environmental music non-profit organization, EcoSono (www.ecosono.org). An Alaskan-born composer, Burtner pioneered methods of musical ecoacoustics to compose sound art from environmental change during a time of dramatic global warming in the North. His climate-change music has been performed in concerts around the world and featured by NASA, PBS NewsHour, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the BBC, the U.S. State Department under President Obama, and National Geographic. He published three evening-length intermedia climate change works including the IDEA Award-winning telematic opera, Auksalaq. In 2020 he received an Emmy Award for “Composing Music with Snow and Glaciers” a feature on his Glacier Music by Alaska Public Media. In 2021 he published the album Avian Telemetry/Six Ecoacoustic Quintets (Parma Records) commissioned by the Shi Center for Sustainability and performed by the Furman Percussion Ensemble, and the immersive multimedia environment, Dwelling in the Enfolding (Anchorage Museum) with Mona Kasra, a work available through the Oculus platform.

Nalini Chhetri is the associate director for international initiatives, and clinical associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and with the School of Sustainability. She holds a doctorate in education policy studies with a minor in demography from Pennsylvania State University, and an M.Sc in Cyto-genetics. Professor Chhetri’s work centers on climate impacts and communication, technological impacts in developing nations, knowledge systems, gender, and urban sustainability. Her career also included directing sustainable development programs for international nongovernmental organizations for over a decade. She works with think-tanks and agencies in Bangladesh, China, Ghana, Guyana, India, Jordan, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Thailand, Vietnam and the USA. She has consulted for United Nations and European bilateral agencies.

Netra B. Chhetri is an Associate Professor at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University (ASU).

Maria Cruz-Torres is a socio-cultural anthropologist at Arizona State University. She conducts research on the topic of gender, globalization, and the environment in Mexico, and is also involved in a National Science Foundation interdisciplinary, transnational collaborative research project focusing on the links between human and biophysical processes in coastal marine ecosystems in Baja California, Mexico.

Alycia de Mesa is a mixed race American of Apache and Indigenous of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango, Mexico, Japanese, and British-German descent. She is a Senior Sustainability Scholar with ASU Global Institute of Sustainability & Innovation and a faculty instructor for the School of Sustainability teaching undergraduates in core sustainability topics and graduate students in sustainability leadership. Before teaching at ASU, she spent over 20 years in brand, marketing, storytelling and communications for start-ups, non-profits, and Fortune 500 companies and authored two brand books for business audiences through McGraw-Hill (New York) and Palgrave Macmillan (London). She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Human and Social Dimensions in Science and Technology at ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Her research interests include Indigenous and people of color futures and emerging technologies effects on POC communities.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor in the English Department and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (Virginia, 2005), Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford, 2011) and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge, 2015). She is also the editor of special issues of the journals ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment on postcolonial ecocriticism (2007), New Literatures Review on island studies (2011) and co-editor of a special issue of the Australian journal Interventions: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific on militarization (2015). From 2015-2020 she was the co-editor of the international, interdisciplinary and open access journal Environmental Humanities. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Hawai‘i, 2007) and a book about climate change, empire, and the literary and visual arts called Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke, 2019).

Giovanna Di Chiro is Professor of Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College where she teaches courses on environmental justice theory, ecofeminism(s), action research methods, and community sustainability. She is a co-founder and faculty partner with Serenity Soular, a campus-community collaborative in North Philadelphia working to build community and worker-owned solar energy cooperatives, to train local youth in solar systems installation, and to provide affordable rooftop solar for low-income residents. Formerly, Di Chiro was a policy advisor with Nuestras Raíces (our roots), a community organization that focuses on urban agriculture, food justice, and resiliency in the Puerto Rican/Latinx communities of Holyoke, Massachusetts.  Di Chiro has published widely on the intersections of environmental science, policy, and activism addressing issues of human rights, food security, and environmental and climate justice.

Hallie Eakin is a professor in the School of Sustainability and affiliated professor in the School of Urban Planning and Geographical Sciences. Her research focuses on social, institutional and political relations that shape human vulnerability to intersecting stressors, including climate extremes and climate change, and how transdisciplinary research can support efforts towards just and sustainable social-environmental transformation. Professor Eakin’s work has been largely based in Mexico and Latin America, addressing vulnerability and transformation in relation to farming, rural livelihoods, food systems, water scarcity and urban resilience. With colleagues at the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex, UK, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico,she has explored the potential for “Transformation Laboratories” to foster spaces for creative approaches to persistent sustainability challenges

Stephani Foote is the Jackson and Nichols Professor of English at West Virginia University. She is the author of Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001), The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism (2014), the editor, with Elizabeth Mazzolini, of Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice (2012). With Stephanie LeMenager, she is the founder and editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.

William Gleason is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in environmental humanities, children’s literature, and popular culture, and is affiliated with the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Program in Environmental Studies, and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. He is the author of Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature and The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, and co-editor of Keywords for Environmental Studies (with Joni Adamson and David N. Pellow), Romance Fiction and American Culture (with Eric Murphy Selinger), and The Pocket Instructor: Literature (with Diana Fuss).

Lisa Yin Han is a critical media scholar and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Her research examines media infrastructures, scientific knowledge cultures, and the socio-technological histories of mediation in aquatic environments like the deep ocean.

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her novel, Solar Storms, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the International Impact Award, as was her novel, Power. Her most recent awards have been the 2016 Thoreau Prize from PEN, and the Native Arts and Culture Award. Recent publications include her new poetry volumes,  The Radiant Lives of Animals (2020), A History of Kindness (2020), DARK. SWEET. New and Selected Poems (2014), Indios (2012) and Rounding the Human Corners (2008, Pulitzer nominee). In 2007, Linda Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame for her writing.

Willis Jenkins lives in the Rivanna River watershed (Monacan land), where he works as Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Jenkins co-directs UVA’s Coastal Futures Conservatory and Sanctuary Lab. He is the the author of two award-winning books on intersections of ethics, religion, and environment, including The Future of Ethics, which won an American Academy of Religion Award. Current research focuses on food ethics, religion & mass extinction, religion & climate change, and shifting senses of the sacred in Anthropocene landscapes.

Owain gained an MSc (Society and Space) and PhD in Cultural Geography at the world-leading Department of Geography, University of Bristol 1993-1997. Conducting post-doctoral research at Bristol, Exeter, the Open University and other institutions, in a series of RCUK funded projects, we has studied and written about many aspects of nature-society relations including; landscape, place  and memory;  the environmental crisis;  children’s geographies; and transformative theories of pragmatism and non-representation. He has conducted research projects on  water and society (floods, tides, coastal cultures);  trees, place and landscape; and childhood, memory, nature and place. He led a £1.5 million Art and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities project which involves eight UK universities, and numerous community partners and artists in four case study areas across the UK. This project sought to creatively explore and transform connections within and between communities, and communities and nature, in relation to water issues. Owain was appointed as the first Professor of Environmental Humanities in the UK in 2014 at Bath Spa University, and was deputy director of the Research Centre for the Environmental Humanities 2016 – 2019.  He has published/co-published over 90 scholarly articles and five books;  Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide: Embodiment, performance, practice (2023),  with Anna Pigott, and Ben Parry; Visual Culture in the Northern British Archipelago: Imagining Islands (2018), with Ysanne Holt and David-Martin-Jones; Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (2017), with Michelle Bastian, Niamh Moore and Emma Roe; Geography and Memory: Identity, Place and Becoming, (2012), with Jo Garde-Hansen;  Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees, and Trees in their Place (2002), with Paul Cloke. He has successfully supervised four Environmental Humanities PhDs with art practice.

Sally Kitch is a University and Regent’s Professor of Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is also a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist in ASU’s Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and founding Director of both the Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) and the Humanities Lab at ASU. Beginning in 2008, she co-directed a team of humanities center directors to develop an international project, entitled Humanities for the Environment (HfE), through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. After receiving funding from the A.W. Mellon Foundation (2013-15), for which Kitch was co-PI, that project led to today’s HfE international consortium. Kitch now serves as a North American Observatory Convener for that consortium. Her environmental humanities (EH) research projects include developing ways to enhance the role of the humanities in the sustainability sciences and in transforming human behavior, as well as expanding eco-feminist theory and articulating the interconnection between socio-cultural and planetary hazards in the Anthropocene. Recent EH articles include “What’s Really Toxic in the Anthropocene?,” “Cautionary Notes on Sustainability Principles,“ “Experimental Humanities and Humanities for the Environment,” “How Can Humanities Interventions Promote Progress in the Environmental Sciences?” and “Eco-sin: A Proposal for Environmental Action.”

Stephanie LeMenager is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature, and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her work on climate change and the humanities has been featured in The New York Times, ClimateWire, Science Friday, NPR, the CBC, and other public venues. Her publications include the books Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, which defines the 20th-century United States as the era of petromodernity, Manifest and Other Destinies, a monograph about the alternatives to Manifest Destiny that might have developed in the US West, Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, a co-authored essay collection for scholars, Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, a co-authored collection for teachers interested in bringing climate change into humanities classrooms, and, finally, a four-volume collection of the 100 best scholarly articles in the Environmental Humanities, Literature and Environment: Critical and Primary Sources, co-edited with Professor Teresa Shewry. She is currently finishing two book projects, on fictionality in the era of climate change and the public lands.

Karen McGlathery is Director of the Environmental Resilience Institute and Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is also Director of the Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research program, a collaboration of eight universities and 25 researchers funded by the U.S. government to understand how climate impacts coastal communities. She has previously held positions as Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Virginia, and visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen and the National Environmental Research institute in Denmark.

Her research focuses on the effects of climate change, nutrient pollution and species invasions on seagrass, seaweed and salt marsh ecosystems. Based on long-term research on carbon sequestration in restored seagrass meadows, her group wrote the international protocol for issuing carbon credits for seagrass restoration in the voluntary carbon market and their work led to government legislation in Virginia to allow carbon offset trading for seagrass restoration. In addition to Virginia, she and her students have worked in New England, Florida, Bermuda, Denmark, New Zealand, and Mozambique.

Joan McGregor is a philosophy professor and faculty head in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose current research is focused on environmental, climate, and food injustices to members of racial minority groups.  Growing out of a Mellon funded grant, “Humanities for the Anthropocene” she led a project entitled Dinner 2040: The Future of Food resulting in an event in 2016 with 90 humanists and community members envisioning and planning a justice food future. In 2020, our team were awarded another Mellon grant in collaboration with universities around the world, the grant’s title is: CHCI Global Humanities Institute on Climate Justice and Problems of Scale. As a result of  projects like it, Arizona Humanities Council picked her as Outstanding Public Humanities Scholar in 2019.  Another related research project is focused on the loss of moral capital and how moral repair will require building our moral capital in an inclusion manner. In 2016, she directed her third NEH Summer Institute: “Extending the Land Ethic: Current Humanities Voices and Sustainability.” Other recent articles published: “Towards a Philosophical Understanding of TEK and Ecofeminism” in   Traditional Ecological Knowledge:  Learning from Indigenous Methods for Environmental Sustainability  (2018): “Values on your plate: Dinner 2040” Resilience 4.2 (2018);  “Public Interests and the Duty of Food Citizenship” Citizenship and Immigration – Borders, Migration and Political Membership in a Global (2016);  “Force, Consent and the Reasonable Woman,” reprinted in Sexual Ethics: An Anthology  (July 2016).

G. Mauricio Mejía is an associate professor of design at Arizona State University. He explores design approaches to change behaviors, transform systems, and envision desirable futures. His current research and practice are related to diverse areas of application including health, sustainability, and business innovation. Dr. Mejía studies and works with emergent and strategic design practices such as visual sense-making, interaction design, service design, organizational design, and design futures. He received a PhD in Design from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a Master of Design degree from the University of Cincinnati.

Arina Melkozernova has an interdisciplinary background in Digital Humanities, art (Intermedia) and science (Biology). Arina is pursuing her PhD studies in the Comparative Culture and Language program at the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University (Committee chairs: Juliann Vitullo & Joni Adamson). Her research focuses on traditional knowledges and investigates connections between local diets, biosemiotics and resilience. Arina is involved in the collaborative digital archiving project “Making History Accessible” with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana Heritage Department and ASU Professor Denise Bates. Arina is working as an instructional designer at the School of Sustainability. She is keeping her professional development continuous throughout her career as a researcher, a teacher, a media producer, a data visualization and web technology expert, and an artist. Arina is actively supporting services that celebrate diversity and inclusion.

Dr. Navarro-Perez completed her PhD in Environmental Life Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU) in July 2024. Her research explored how plant roots, specifically grass root functional traits, respond to different soil conditions created by restoration efforts, how these traits influence decomposition, and how emerging photogrammetry tools can be used to measure belowground processes.

Alongside her scientific work, Dr. Navarro-Perez  is deeply interested in community engagement, intersectional justice, and art–science communication. Bringing these interests together has shaped her approach to ecological restoration as a holistic practice that connects ecosystems, people, and systems of care.

Sreya Ann Oommen is a Postdoctoral Environmental Humanities scholar and UNESCO BRIDGES Flagship Hub coordinator. Her research focuses on Island Literary Studies, Critical Ocean Studies, Decolonial Studies, and Sustainability Studies. Oommen’s current research problematizes the perception of islands within pre-established frameworks that restrict the authentic representation of the historical, social, and cultural realities of island communities. Her research examines the definitions of islands, islandness, and placeness to conceptualize the analyses of literary texts. Oommen’s current research also addresses futures literacy, energy humanities, environmental justice, and community benefits planning. She has published articles on Anglo-Indian Studies, Human Rights Literature, and Ecocriticism.

David N. Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he teaches courses on social change movements, environmental justice, human-animal conflicts, sustainability, and social inequality. His teaching and research focus on ecological justice issues in the U.S. and globally. His books include: What is Critical Environmental Justice?; Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement; The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice; The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); and Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. He has served on the Boards of Directors for the Community Environmental Council, the Global Action Research Center, Greenpeace USA, International Rivers, and the Fund for Santa Barbara.

Tracy Perkins is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She specializes in social inequality, social movements and the environment through a focus on environmental justice activism. Her forthcoming book, Movement Matters: Protest, Policy and Three Decades of Environmental Justice Activism (University of California Press), examines the political evolution of the California environmental justice movement from the 1980s to the mid 2010s.

In addition to her academic writing, Dr. Perkins documents environmental justice activism for public audiences. Examples include Voices from the Valley: Environmental Justice in California’s San Joaquin Valley (www.voicesfromthevalley.org), In Her Own Words: Remembering Teresa de Anda, Pesticides Activist (1959-2014) (rememberingteresa.org), the Buzzard Point Oral History Project in Washington DC, and a project-in-development to create a digital archive and multi-media storytelling website on a 1990s era anti-nuclear waste landfill campaign along the lower Colorado River. Dr. Perkins previously served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She has a B.A. in Development Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, a M.S. in Community Development from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. See more of her work at tracyperkins.org.

Indulata Prasad is an assistant professor in Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is the recipient of the 2021 Bluestone Rising Scholar Award and the author of Feminist and Anti-caste Activism in the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Rural Bihar “We Achieved Great Feats!”, Taylor and Francis Group, 2025.  Her current work focuses on grassroots mobilization, youth community-driven archives (Y-CDA), ecology, and the digital divide.

Gary Reger is Emeritus Professor of History and Emeritus Hobart Professor of Classical Languages at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His research has revolved around Hellenistic economic history, Greek epigraphy, and the study of human activity in deserts across time and space. His publications include Regionalism and Change in the Economy of Independent Delos, over 50 journal articles and book chapters, and four edited volumes, the most recent of which, Reading Aridity in Western American Literature (with Jada Ach) collects papers on the American desert Southwest. Two books are under contract: Writing the American Desert, essays on the American Southwest, and First There Is a Mountain, a long-term examination of the human geography of a mountain in southwestern Turkey. The award of a Fulbright Fellowship brought him to UWA and has made possible this symposium.

Jennifer Richter is an assistant professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, where she is also a senior global futures scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She studies how policies that govern innovations and research are created and then taken up by local populations, especially in the American West. Her research focuses particularly on energy justice, specifically related to the cul­tural, social, and environmental issues that come with larger energy transitions. She coedited the book Environmental Realism: Challenging Solutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Beth Roach is a tribal leader, a farmer and surfer, a teacher and historian, an entrepreneur, fundraiser and environmental activist. For over a decade, she has served on the Tribal Council of the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and led environmental initiatives. In 2018, she co-founded the Alliance of Native Seedkeepers, an emerging benefit corporation, to protect endangered Indigenous seeds and waterways. From 2018-2020, Beth chaired the inaugural Virginia Council on Environmental Justice; in 2020, Beth launched a tribal coastal resilience initiative with a team of scientists, policy makers, and tribal communities to implement climate adaptation strategies within the shared waters of Virginia and North Carolina. As a public fellow for UVA’s Coastal Futures Conservatory, she is capturing water stories from indigenous perspectives to assist in climate resiliency planning.
For the Sierra Club, Beth is a fundraiser and program lead for the Women’s Earth Alliance and Sierra Club’s US Grassroots Accelerator. Her past work includes chief ranger of interpretation for Virginia State Parks, grants manager for the James River Association and climate justice organizer for Mothers Out Front. Beth earned her bachelor’s degree in public history from James Madison University. She lives along the inner banks of the Albemarle Sound with her partner, cat, and many wildlife critters.

Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Professor of English and American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Immigrant Whiteness: Neoliberalism, Race, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018) and Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008). She is also the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002) and of two special journal issues, one on comparative border studies and the other on postsocialist literatures in the United States. In addition, Sadowski-Smith has published articles on transnational adoption, transnational reality TV, and international migration. She is currently working on refugee and climate migration as well as on a special journal issue on Global Post/Socialism.

Syaman Rapongan is a prominent Tao aboriginal writer residing on the Orchid Island (Lanyu). He received his B.A. in French, M.A. in Anthropology and Ph.D. candidacy in Taiwan literature from National Cheng Kung University. He is productive and received many major literature awards. His works include The Myths of Badai Bay (1992), Cold Sea, Deep Feeling: The Ocean Pilgrims (1997), Black Wings (1999), The Face of a Sea Voyager (2007), The Eyes of the Sky (2012), Floating in the Sea (2014), and his most recent work The Death of Anromien in 2015. Some of his novels are translated into English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and German. Currently he works as Associate Research Fellow at the National Center for Marine Technologies in Taiwan.

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a professor of environmental humanities/arts and justice in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. Her areas of research include queer and feminist posthumanities, critical plant studies, Canadian environmental literatures/ ecocriticism, biocultural histories and politics, and public environmental engagement through literature and storytelling.

Her sole-authored and collaboratively edited publications in these fields include the books The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999); This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment (2004); Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010); and Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (2019).

She has also recently published essays in Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose; What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?; Plant Fever: Towards a Phyto-Centric Design; The Goose; Veer Ecology: Key Words for Ecotheory; ISLE; Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief; Resilience; The Routledge International Handbook on Gender and Environment; GLQ; The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory; and The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. She has served as the President of ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and of ALECC, the Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada.

Cate is currently working on a new book, Plantasmagoria: Botanical Encounters in the (M)Anthropocene, which seeks to develop an embodied, feminist, relational, plant-centric response to current conditions of climate change, neoliberal capitalism, and the escalating profitization of life.

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor, jointly appointed between the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Trained in molecular biology, food chemistry, the culinary arts, and food studies (Ph.D., NYU), Spackman’s work examines how the design and technological manipulation of sensory experience shape how people use, value, and react to the ingestible environment. She specifically focuses on how sensorial interactions shape individual and societal governance practices, with the aim of exploring what new futures might become possible if new approaches to shaping taste and smell emerge. She employs a theoretical and methodological commitment to critique and intervene in current practice at multiple scales. These interventions are grounded in offering alternative pathways forward for practitioners and the public in making better futures. To do this, Spackman draws together art and science throughout her work of 1) identifying how Sensory Ecologies function and impact health and well-being; 2) building awareness of and exploring how Sensory Labor and Politics function; and 3) developing new approaches to examine how sensing shapes Environmental Futures. Author of multiple papers, public-facing articles, and co-director of ASU’s art|science festival of futures, Emerge, Spackman is currently is finishing a book manuscript with the working title Making Nothing. You can find her on twitter: @christyspackman; or on the web: christyspackman.com. Otherwise she is probably in her research kitchen making flavorful futures.

Julie Sze is a Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment. Sze’s research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism.

Professor Sze has published 3 sole authored books, edited a collection, and written over 60 journal articles and book chapters primarily in the fields of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, geography, and public policy. She works in collaboration with environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists and community-based organizers in California and New York.

Professor Sze has been an invited keynote at international conferences and events in Germany, China, Italy, Abu Dhabi, France and Canada. She spoken at over 65 universities and colleges in the U.S.  She is deeply committed to public scholarship. She is also an active mentor for first generation and low-income students in graduate education.

Ilaria Tabusso-Marcyan received her Ph.D. at UC San Diego and is Assistant Teaching Professor at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on food and farming cultures from a comparative approach. She is interested in how grassroots movements related to food and farming are supporting and promoting resilient, sustainable, culturally and socially just systems. At Miami University (Ohio) she was acting-coordinator for The Institute for Food. She is the author of the monograph Landscapes of Resistance and Food Justice in Italy: New Organic Intellectuals (Lexington Books, forthcoming), co-editor of Contesting Extinctions. Decolonial and Regenerative Futures (Lexington Books 2021), and has published several articles on food and farming cultures.

Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is Regents Professor, Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, the Director of Jewish Studies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.   She holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Philosophy and Mysticism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1978), and a BA in Religious Studies from SUNY-Stony Brook, New York (1974).

Tirosh-Samuelson is a Jewish intellectual historian who focuses on the interplay of philosophy and mysticism, Judaism and science, and Judaism and ecology. In addition to over 50 essays and book chapters, she is the author of Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991) which received the award of the Hebrew University for the best work in Jewish history for 1991, and the author of Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge and Well-Being in Premodern Judaism (2003), and Religion and Environment: The Case of Judaism (2020).

Tirosh-Samuelson explores the interplay of religion, science and technology with a focus on transhumanism and the relationship between Judaism, science and medicine. She is the PI or Co-PI of several Templeton funded projects: 1) “Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, and Technology” (2006-2010); 2) “The Transhumanist Imagination: Innovation, Secularization and Eschatology” (2012-14); “Beyond Secularization: Piloting New Approaches for the Study of Religion, Science, and Technology in Public Life” (2016-2018) and 4) “Beyond Secularization: Religion, Science, and Technology in Public Life” (2019-2022). Tirosh-Samuelson also serves as Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at ASU, and manages the international society, Judaism, Science and Medicine Group (JSMG) and organizes its annual conferences.

Megan Anne Todd, Program Lead for the Master of Liberal Studies program at Arizona State University, is a performance studies scholar and embodied movement practitioner, teaching across humanities, applied arts, organizational leadership, and project management. She earned her Ph.D. in Theatre/Performance of the Americas and M.S. in Exercise & Wellness (ASU). You can find her work published in the Journal of Pan African Studies, Theatre Journal, Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies and in the edited book, The Sonic World of Dance Film. Areas of scholarship include: arts and humanities as public practice, sustainability and health, as well as creativity and/as leadership. Her work centers collaborative, creative, and critical modes of inquiry and practice that generate pathways and possibilities toward a more just, equitable, and better world.

Charles Travis (Ph.D., Trinity College Dublin, 2006) is an Assistant Professor of Geography and GIS with the Department of History at the University of Texas, Arlington. With research interests in literary, cultural, historical geography, GIS, the digital, environmental humanities and geo-ethics, Charles is editorial board member of the journal Literary Geographies and the Springer Press Historical Geography & Geosciences Series.

His book publications include:

–Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis (Springer Press: 2020)

–The STEAM Revolution: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Humanities and Mathematics (Springer Press: 2018)

–The Digital Arts and Humanities: Neogeography, Social Media and Big Data Integrations and Applications (Springer Press: 2016)

–Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS (Esri Press: 2015)

–History and GIS: Epistemologies, Reflections and Considerations (Springer Press: 2012)

–Literary Landscapes: Geographies of Irish Stories, 1929-1946 (2009).

Charles’ work also appears in peer-review publications including Quaternary Research, Global and Planetary Change, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Historical Geography and other peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.

Rebecca Tsosie is a Regents Professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, and she serves as a Faculty Co-Chair for the Indigenous Peoples’ Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona. Professor Tsosie, who is of Yaqui descent, is widely known for her work in the fields of Federal Indian law and indigenous peoples’ human rights. Prior to joining the U of A faculty, Professor Tsosie was a Regent’s Professor and Vice Provost for Inclusion and Community Engagement at Arizona State University. Professor Tsosie was the first faculty Executive Director for ASU’s Indian Legal Program and served in that position for 15 years. Professor Tsosie has published widely on sovereignty, self-determination, cultural pluralism, environmental policy and cultural rights. She teaches in the areas of Federal Indian Law, Property, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Cultural Resources Law. Professor Tsosie is a member of the Arizona Bar Association and the California Bar Association. Professor Tsosie serves as a Supreme Court Justice for the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and as an Associate Judge on the San Carlos Tribal Court of Appeals. She received her B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Kyndra Turner is a Lecturer at California State University, Channel Islands. Her research draws on transnational American studies methodologies and ecocriticism in order to provide models for what she calls “readings in the Anthropocene” or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts that intervene and question dominant ideologies of power and progress. Her book chapter titled, “Writing in the Anthropocene from the Global North to the Global South: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Richard Power’s The Echo Maker,” was published in Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory edited by Kevin Maier and Sarah Jaquette Ray (University of Alaska Press, 2017).

Juliann Vitullo is an Associate Professor of Italian studies, a Senior Sustainability Scholar, and Co-director of the Humanities Lab at Arizona State University. She has written on various aspects of medieval, early modern, and contemporary Italian culture with emphasis on the relationship between textual traditions and the material world, including economics, gender, and food studies. She currently is researching the history of the translocal traditions collectively defined as varieties of the Mediterranean diet and the different ways in which they have been translated and branded. Her community-based research and teaching emphasize the importance of preserving the cultural and ecological knowledge of indigenous foodways, including those in the Southwest where she lives and teaches, for a more equitable and sustainable future.

Kyle holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University and is a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration. His primary research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples and the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Shawnee, Oklahoma. His articles have appeared in journals such as Climatic Change, Environmental Justice, Hypatia, Ecological Processes, Synthese, Human Ecology, Journal of Global Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics, Ethics, Policy & Environment, and Ethics & the Environment.