Henry Nickson "Eroded Landscape" (Cap Haitien, 2007)
Ursula Heise - Associate Professor, Stanford University
Ursula Heise is an Associate Professor in English and Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. She specializes in contemporary American and European literature and literary theory; her major fields of interest are theories of modernization, postmodernization and globalization, ecology and ecocriticism, literature and science, narrative theory, science fiction, and media theory. She has published articles on contemporary authors from the US, Latin America and Western Europe. She is the author of a book on the postmodern novel, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press,1997) and, more recently, a book on environmentalism, ecocriticism, and globalization, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008). She is currently working on a book project entitled The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature, which deals with the role of biological form in works of the European, Latin American and North American avantgardes of the twentieth century.
Jayne Lewis - Professor, University of California, Irvine
Jayne Lewis is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She taught at UCLA from 1988 to 2004, and is the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740 (Cambridge, `1995), Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge 2000), and The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots (Bedford, 2000) as well as numerous articles on topics pertaining to 18th-century British literature and culture. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS and the UC President's Fellowship, and she is coeditor of two essay collections. Her current research project examines the relationship between enlightenment conceptions of the air in science and theology and the emergence of 'atmosphere' as a dimension of literary experience in the period.
Timothy Morton - Professor, University of California, Davis
Timothy Morton is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007) and The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2009), and editor of Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (Palgrave, 2004). He has published widely on ecology, literature, food and eating, literary theory, and philosophy, including a recent article entitled "Queer Ecology" (PMLA, forthcoming). His blog can be found here.
Pablo Mukherjee - Associate Professor, Warwick University
Pablo Mukherjee grew up and was educated in Calcutta, Oxford and Cambridge. He is currently Associate Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick University. He is the author of Crime and Empire (Oxford UP, 2003) and Postcolonial Environments (Palgrave 2009), as well as articles on colonial and postcolonial literatures and cultures and Victorian Studies. While putting the finishing touches to his book on contemporary Indian environmental issues and the novel in English, he has just started researching and publishing on two new areas - Victorian natural disasters and Victorian world literary systems. He has also reviewed films, theatre and visual arts for national media in the UK.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert - Professor, Vassar College
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a Professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Program in Africana Studies at Vassar College, where she holds the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico and an M.A., an M.Phil., and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. She is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (2003, with Margarite Fernández Olmos), and most recently, Literatures of the Caribbean (2008). Her most recent book project, Endangered Species: Ecology and the Discourse of the Caribbean Nation, has just been submitted for publication. She is at work on Glimpses of Hell, a study of the aftermath of the 1902 eruption of the Mont Pelée volcano of Martinique, and on Painting the Caribbean (1865-1898): Frederic Church, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, and Winslow Homer.
Jennifer Wenzel - Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Jennifer Wenzel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Previous publications include "Petro-Magic-Realism: A Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature" (Postcolonial Studies), "The Pastoral Promise and the Political Imperative: The Plaasroman Tradition in an Era of Land Reform" (Modern Fiction Studies), and "Epic Struggles over India's Forests in Mahasweta Devi's Short Fiction" (Alif). Her book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anti-colonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Julian Yates - Associate Professor, University of Delaware
Julian Yates received his B.A. (Hons.) from St. Anne’s College in 1990, Oxford and PhD in English Literature from UCLA in 1996. He makes his home at University of Delaware, where he teaches courses on Medieval and Renaissance British Literature, literary theory, and material culture studies. His first book, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) examined the social and textual lives of what contemporaries named “cunning” or “curious conveyances”—that is manufactured objects whose effects appeared to exceed the powers of the human agents that made them (relics, portrait miniatures, the printed page, secret hiding places) and was a finalist for the MLA Best First Book Prize in 2003. His recent work focuses on adapting the critical language of material culture studies to deal with “things” that were once alive (plants, animals, fungi) and is evolving into a book with the working title “Renaissance Organics.” This project re-examines the lives of pastoral, georgic, and utopian writing in the period to discover what resources these genres offer for thinking how we configure collectives of “different animated actors” (human persons, animals, plants, etc). This project has been supported by a long-term NEH fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC (2006-2007), a Francis Bacon Foundation award at the Huntington Library in San Marino CA (2007), and a Franklin Research Award from the American Philosophical Society (2007). He is currently finishing two essays: “Skin Merchants: Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry 6,” and “Animal Otium: The Ruminant legacies of Renaissance Humanism.” An early essay deriving from the project is available online here.