NIKHIL ANAND
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
University of Pennsylvania
Nikhil Anand is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power, and climate change. He addresses these questions by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His first book, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Politics in Mumbai (Duke University Press 2017), examines the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure. Following his interest in infrastructure studies in political anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies, Nikhil co-edited (with Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta) The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press 2018). His new book project, Urban Seas, decenters the grounds of urban planning by drawing attention to the ways in which climate-changed seas are remaking coastal cities today.
NANDITA BADAMI
Postdoctoral Scholar
University of Pennsylvania
Nandita Badami is a cultural anthropologist interested in the operationalization of broad categories of meaning at the intersection of the economic and the environmental. Her PhD, from the University of California, Irvine, addressed the logics of sunlight as a modern energy form through India’s ambitious National Solar Mission, combining interests in anthropology, science and technology studies, the history of economics, the sociology of knowledge, and political theory. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities she has been developing her next project on the histories and politics of mitigation as a template of climate solution.
HANS BAUMANN
INDEPENDENT ARTIST
Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist and land art practitioner based in Los Angeles. Drawing from his background in human geography and landscape architecture, his research-based practice reflects upon ecological collapse, the dynamics of climate change, and the decolonization of American land. His essays and projects have appeared in a variety of publications, including e-flux architecture, Hyperallergic, The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land and the Politics of Environment (University of California Press, 2021) and Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), and his work has been supported by institutions such as the Getty Foundation, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Baumann is a Fellow of the Landscape Architecture Foundation and holds degrees from Prifysgol Caerdydd and Harvard University.
INGRID DIRAN
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
Ingrid Diran is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teaching center on intersections among the environmental humanities, critical race studies, and critical theory (especially biopolitics and Marxism). Her recent work has been published in American Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Diacritics, and the Australasian Philosophical Review.
NATHAN HENSLEY
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, environmental humanities, and the novel. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford, 2016) and coeditor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham, 2019). Essay clusters he has coedited have appeared in Modernism/Modernity Print +, Victorian Literature and Culture, and elsewhere; his own writing has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel, the LA Review of Books, and e-flux journal, among other venues. Hensley was born in Fresno, California and now lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. His current work is about systems that are falling apart.
CAMERON HU
POSTDOCTORAL SCHOLAR
Konrad Lorenz Institute, Vienna
Cameron Hu lives in Vienna and studies the moral and political valences of technoscience in liberal empire. He is currently writing an ethnography, Knowing Destroying: The Geopolitics of Fracking and the Metaphysics of Imperialism, based on fieldwork in the Permian Basin oil fields of West Texas; a series of theoretical essays on conceptions of historicity, necessity, and agency in science studies; and a collaborative exploration of conceptual loss, arts of forgetting, and the ethics of declining, removing, and destroying knowledge. He received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2021 and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute.
REBECCA MACKLIN
POSTDOCTORAL SCHOLAR
THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
Rebecca Macklin is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She was previously Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, having obtained a PhD from the University of Leeds in 2020. She is in the final stages of writing her first book, Unsettling Fictions: Relationality and Resistance in Native American and South African Literatures, as well as developing new research on Indigenous literary and cultural engagements with resource extraction.
Tom Özden-Schilling
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Johns Hopkins UNIVERSITY
Dr. Tom Özden-Schilling is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at John Hopkins University. His current book project, Science, Survivance, and the War in the Woods (forthcoming from Duke University Press), is a historical ethnography of twenty-first century environmental deregulation in British Columbia, Canada, and its effects on both Indigenous and settler cultures of expertise. Focusing on different researchers’ struggles to maintain long-term forestry experiments and sovereignty projects in the wake of government downsizing, the book examines how anthropological studies of expertise might learn to track rural experts and the artifacts of their work as governance institutions unravel. Tom’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, and his publications have appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, American Ethnologist, History and Theory, Endeavour, American Anthropologist, and Cultural Anthropology online. This year, Tom is beginning a new ethnographic project on critical minerals exploration, research, and technology development in Malaysia, Western Australia, and the American Mountain West.
NICHOLAS PEVZNER
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
University of Pennsylvania
Nicholas Pevzner is an Assistant Professor in the department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at UPenn’s Weitzman School of Design, and is a Faculty Fellow at UPenn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. His research spans across the topics of ecological systems, energy landscapes, and climate policy, and is rooted in a socio-ecological framework, with focus on ecological systems and their integration into design, and energy systems and their integration into culturally contested landscapes. His teaching and research look for opportunities for decarbonization across sectors, investigating the impacts of climate policy on physical built environment, on cultural attitudes, and on implications for spatial justice. He teaches design studios, as well as courses on urban ecology, urban design, and the history of energy systems.
KAREN PINKUS
PROFESSOR
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Karen Pinkus is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. One of the first humanists to address climate change, she has been writing, teaching and lecturing on the subject for fifteen years. Her forthcoming book, Subsurface, reads nineteenth-century narratives from one side of a widening crevasse, separating us from our former selves from those “those who did not know.”
ALLAN STOEKL
Professor Emeritus
Pennsylvania State University
Allan Stoekl is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He has written extensively on questions of sustainability, economy, and expenditure. His two books on these topics are: Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability (U of Minnesota Press, 2007) and The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy and Time (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). He is currently based in Philadelphia.
Bethany Wiggin
Faculty Director, Penn Program in environmental Humanities
University of Pennsylvania
Bethany Wiggin is the Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, an Associate Professor of German and member of the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature and English at the University of Pennsylvania, and the immediate past Co-President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Her scholarship explores histories of migration, language, and cultural translation since the Columbian exchange across the north Atlantic world; she is currently completing Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods. She holds research to be a human right and regularly leads public research projects designed to connect academic and community expertise for environmental action. These projects have been supported by the National Geographic, Whiting, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations and include: An Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene, Data Refuge, Futures Beyond Refining, and My Climate Story (selected). She has offered testimony about project findings to audiences ranging from school children, to the City Council of Philadelphia, the U.S. Congress, and UNESC.
Derek Woods
Assistant Professor
University of British Columbia
Derek Woods is assistant professor of English and media studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His recent publications include “Terraforming Earth” in diacritics and Three Critiques of Existential Risk, a short book co-authored with Joshua Schuster and published by Minnesota. He is writing a monograph called What Is Ecotechnology? He also publishes about symbiosis and the critical theory of scale.
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