Recent Publications and Podcasts
“Nature Creeps Back: Creature Features and the Environment with Christy Tidwell and Bridgitte Barclay,” EcoCast, October 2021.
"Hopeful Ecomedia in the Pandemic,” co-written with Environmental Studies students Blythe Keuning, Angie Lopez, and Steven Carter (with artwork and work from three other students, as well), ASLE , October 20, 2021.
“Introduction” and co-editor, Environmental Creature Feature Special Issue in Science Fiction Film and Television, Fall 2021.
“‘Leaving a Record of Their Coming’: The Creature from the Black Lagoon in the Anthropocene,” in Science Fiction Film and Television, Fall 2021.
“The Extinction-haunted Salton Sea in The Monster that Challenged the World (1957)” in Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, July 2021.
Invited Reflection Piece, “Mortal Critters Join Forces: Living in a Kaiju Film,” Environmental Science Fiction Special Issue of MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, August 2020.
“Teaching Ecohorror: Creature from the Black Lagoon” on Association for the Study of Literature and Environment website, June 2021.
“All of this is terminal”: Devolution in Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God” in Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss, Ed. Jonathan Elmore, Rowman and Littlefield’s Lexington Ecocrticial Theory and Practice Series, May 2020.
Gender and Environment in Science Fiction. Co-edited with Christy Tidwell and wrote chapter, “Female Beasties: Camp Resistance in 1950s SF Wom-Animal Creature Features.” Rowman and Littlefield’s Lexington Ecocrticial Theory and Practice Series, January 2019.
“Rebellions Are Built on Hope” in Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship, Winter 2019.
“Making it Graphic” in The Pocket Instructor: Literature. Ed. Diana Fuss and William Gleason. Princeton University Press. 2015.
“Through the Plexiglass: A History of Museum Dioramas.” The Atlantic Online. Ed. Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg, October 14, 2015.
Recent Courses
ENG2410: Literature and the Environment
This course examines the relationship between literature and the environment by addressing both stylistic and cultural concerns. In doing so, the course will examine the conventions of three major genres: poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Throughout the course, students will gain experience writing both about and in each of these literary genres in order to gain greater understanding of the relationship between literature and the environment.
ENV 3811/ ENG 3811
Environmental Research and Writing: Popular Science and Advocacy
This course will focus on American environmental popular science narratives and advocacy writing. Students will research environmental science communication in museum habitats, popular science writing, as well as other ecomedia. Students will end the semester with the presentation of an in-depth research project on some aspect of popular environmental discourses.
IDS1200: Speculative Fiction and Film
This course will explore speculative fiction and film as reflective of scientific and cultural issues. Questions we will address include the following:
How are speculative genres defined and delineated?
What texts blur boundaries?
How do speculative texts reflect scientific and cultural issues in a particular moment and place?
What do our monsters tell us about ourselves?
What hopes are entwined in speculative fiction texts?
What does speculative fiction tell us about what matters to us?
ENG 3370, American Literature 1945-Present: 21st Century Women of Color
Students will study modern and contemporary literature written since World War II. Reading is supplemented and focused by readings in criticism. The approach may be topical rather than chronological and should develop a student’s sense of what literature has been produced more contemporarily. In poetry, this might include topics such as the Beat movement, the Black Mountain poetry movement, language poetry, confessional and dramatic monologue; and in fiction, this might include the novella or the short-short story or techniques, such as magical realism, meta-fiction and minimalism. This section, specifically, will focus on twenty-first century women of color.
Course Texts:
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Marilyn Chin
Make Your Home Among Strangers, Jennine Capó Crucet
Obviously: Stories from My Timeline, Akilah Hughes
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Various archival, in-class, and posted readings
ENG 2410/ENV 2400, Literature and the Environment
This course examines the relationship between literature and the environment by addressing both stylistic and cultural concerns. In doing so, the course will examine the conventions of three major genres: poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Throughout the course, students will gain experience writing both about and in each of these literary genres in order to gain greater understanding of the relationship between literature and the environment.
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Course Texts
The Overstory, Richard Powers
The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi
Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
Silent Spring (excerpt), Rachel Carson
"Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor" article, Rob Nixon
On the Origin of the Species (excerpt), Charles Darwin
"'Bees not refugees’: the Environmentalist Roots of Anti-immigrant Bigotry," Susie Cagle
Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story about Looking at People Looking at Animals in America (excerpt), Jon Mooallem
Dislocation Blues, Sky Hopinka
Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Volume III, Angie Dell and Joey Eshrich, Eds. through ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination
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IDS 1200: Environmental Creature Features
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This course will focus on environmental creature features as a way to think through empathy, kinship, and “otherness.” The creature feature genre is, like the “monsters” it highlights, inherently hybrid – science fiction, horror, and, camp. Midcentury movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), films dealing with atomic war and evolution/ extinction, helped define the genre, and the first summer blockbuster, Jaws (1975), changed it further. Creature feature films, novels, comics, and games address cultural narratives of human-nonhuman relationships, so they are ripe for ecocritical critique and often have explicitly environmental messages. In analyzing the texts from this course and, by the end of the semester, playing a collaborative world building game, we will ask questions such as the following:
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How are speculative genres (science fiction, horror, magical realism, fantasy) defined and delineated? Why does that matter, and what texts blur boundaries?
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How do speculative texts reflect scientific and cultural issues in a particular moment and place?
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How do we treat monsters/others in such texts? What do our monsters tell us?
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What hopes are entwined in speculative fiction texts?
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What does speculative fiction tell us about what matters to us?
Course Texts:
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Frogs (1972)
Jaws (1975)
The Host (2006)
Beowulf: A New Translation, Maria Dahvana Headley
The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Headley
Victor LaValle’s Destroyer, Victor LaValle
Deer Woman: An Anthology, Elizabeth LaPensée and Weshoyot Alvitre
Sweet Tooth, Vol. 1, Jeff Lemire
The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones
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ENV 1000: Introduction to Environmental Studies
Environmental studies is a subject that requires an understanding of issues transcending geographic and disciplinary boundaries to addresses national, regional, and local concerns. As such, students in this course will be introduced to the cultural, ethical, political, scientific, historical, and economic complexities of human activity-environment interactions. Students will analyze evidence, arguments, and concepts through multiple disciplinary lenses, examine important past and present environmental issues, and explore the efforts to understand and address those issues.
Course Texts:
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Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
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World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
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My Octopus Teacher (2020)
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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake
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Fantastic Fungi (2019)
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer
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Gather (2020)
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Green New Deal Congressional Resolution and related readings
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Various case studies, NOAA reports, CDC reports, COP26 and COP27 speeches, and science articles