Editorial Team Profiles

Co-editors-in-chief

Franklin Ginn in a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography at the University of Bristol, UK. His research concerns the histories, cultures and philosophies of everyday encounters with nonhumans, across a wider range of geographic and historical settings. He is author of Domestic Wild: Memory, Nature and Gardening in Suburbia (Routledge, 2016), and a range of articles on the urban green, apocalypse and biophilosophy. Franklin is a Rachel Carson Centre alumni, and was a founding member of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network. His current research projects include vegetal politics and nonhuman economy in Pakistan (funded by the Royal Geographical Society), soil cosmopolitics in Himalayan agriculture (funded by the UK’s GCRF), and speculative work on multispecies space travel.

Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History at University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research ranges widely in time and subject matter—from medieval waste disposal to modern rewilding projects. She is primarily interested in human-animal relations over time, including the role of technologies and emotions as mediators of human-animal encounters. She is author of Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (MIT Press, 2019) and co-editor of New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (University of Pittsburg Press, 2013), Northscapes: History, Technology and the Making of Northern Environments (UBC Press, 2013), and Visions of North In Premodern Europe (Brepols, 2018). She co-directs The Greenhouse, an environmental humanities research group at University of Stavanger, and was two-term President of the European Society for Environmental History (2013-2017).

Associate Editors

Andrea Gaynor is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia. An environmental historian, her research seeks to use the contextualising and narrative power of history to assist transitions to more just and sustainable societies. Her most recent book, co-authored with Richard Broome, Charles Fahey and Katie Holmes, is Mallee Country: Land, People, History (Monash University Publishing 2019). She has held fellowships with the Rachel Carson Center, University of Bristol and National Library of Australia, and is convenor of the Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network and Vice-President of the European Society for Environmental History. She teaches world environmental history and Australian history at UWA and is currently researching histories of Landcare in Western Australia, water in Australian urbanisation and nature in Australian urban modernity.

Katja Kwastek is Professor of modern and contemporary art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and one of the co-founders of the Environmental Humanities Center at the VU, hosted by the Interfaculty Research Institute CLUE+. Her research focuses on processual, digital and post-digital art, in the broader contexts of art history, media aesthetics, and the environmental humanities. Under the notion of ‘slow media art’, she researches artworks which explores the interrelations of human and non-human, technological, cultural and biological timeframes. She has lectured internationally and published many books and essays, including her “Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art” (MIT Press, 2013). In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present on the topic of slowness.

Phillip Drake is Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas. His teaching and research explore the ways cultural expression both shapes and is shaped by interactions with the nonhuman world. He is the author of Indonesia and the Politics of Disaster (Routledge, 2017), and has published articles on topics that include animal studies, disasters, science and technology studies, and Marxism. He co-directs the Hall Center Nature & Culture Seminar at the University of Kansas, which supports works in progress in the environmental humanities. His current book project, Parasite Economies, explores parasitism within both human and nonhuman realms, to better identify – and possibly contest – forms of exploitation that entangle multispecies actors.

Anna Krzywoszynska is a Faculty of Social Sciences Research Fellow at The University of Sheffield, and an Associate Director of its Institute for Sustainable Food. Her research concerns agriculture and food as the key spheres for the interaction between human and more-than-human worlds. Her work on knowledge, ethics, and affect in food-related spaces and practices is being published in a range of geography and rural studies journals. Her interest in materiality, life, and ecology brings her to work frequently with the natural sciences. Consequently, she also investigates the potential for opening up the spaces of scientific knowledge production to non-certified expertise, and re-imagining the current division of labour between social and natural sciences. She has published on public participation in science and interdisciplinarity in such journals as Science, Technology and Human Values. Her ongoing work explores the shift towards soils as lively ecosystems in modern agriculture and its related knowledge fields, and the consequences of this for a range of fields. On this, see her co-authored edited collection Thinking with soils, a range of publications, and the Soil Care Network (soilcarenetwork.com).

Hannes Bergthaller is a Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan. He is a founding member and past president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLCE), and a research fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. His work focuses on the literature and cultural history of modern environmentalism (particularly in the US), systems theory and neocybernetics, and environmental philosophy. Together with Eva Horn (U Vienna, Austria), he co-authored The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities (Routledge, 2020). Other recent publications include the edited volume Framing the Environmental Humanities (with Peter Mortensen, 2018), and special issues on petrofiction (Green Letters, 2019) and the representation of climate change (Metaphora, 2017). In his current research project, he brings together Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems and the cultural history of fossil energy.

Yamini Narayanan is Senior Lecturer in International and Community Development at Deakin University, Melbourne. Her work explores the ways in which (other) animals are instrumentalised in sectarian, casteist and even fascist ideologies in India.  Yamini’s research is supported by two prestigious grants from the Australian Research Council. Yamini’s work on animals, race, and nationalism has been published in leading journals including Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning D, Geoforum, Hypatia, South Asia, Society and Animals, and Sustainable Development. With Kathryn Gillespie, she has co-edited a special edition of the Journal of Intercultural Studies on the theme “Animal nationalisms: Multispecies cultural politics, race, and nation un/building narratives” (2020). Another co-edited special issue (with Krithika Srinivasan) is forthcoming in Environment and Planning E on “The species turn in Indian identity politics”. Yamini is founding co-convenor of the Deakin Critical Animal Studies Network. In 2019, Yamini was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Mid-Career Research Excellence. In recognition of her work, she was made Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (FOCAE), a distinguished honour that is conferred through nomination or invitation only.

Allison Mackey is Professor of Anglophone Literatures in the Department of Modern Languages at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa, where she held a postdoctoral research fellowship. Her research interests span the areas of human rights & literature, postcolonial literary & cultural studies, and environmental humanities, focusing on ethics/aesthetics/affect from decolonial, feminist and critical posthuman(ist) perspectives. She is a member of the Red Iberoamericana de Investigación en Humanidades Ambientales (RIHUA) and founding member of the environmental humanities & eco-criticism research group of the Faculty of Humanities at the Universidad de la República. She is Section Editor (Canada/Latin America) for Postcolonial Text, a refereed open access journal on postcolonial, transnational, and indigenous themes. She also serves on the academic committee of the journal Tekoporá: Latin American Review of Environmental Humanities and Territorial Studies, and co-edited the special issue “Writing Environment, Landscape, and Territory in Latin America” published in June 2021.

Inge Konik is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. She teaches environmental ethics, indigenous value systems, ecofeminism, continental philosophy, and film theory. Her current research is focused on materialist ecological feminism, ecologically promising value systems like ubuntu, the discursive politics of emerging environmental movements, transformations in higher education, South African socio-cultural and politico-economic change under neoliberalism, and environmental and feminist cinema. Her writing on these topics has appeared in journals such as Environmental Values, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, and the South African Journal of Art History.

Stefan Skrimshire is an Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, where he teaches political and eco-theology, and continental philosophy. He works mainly on the role of religious faith – and apocalyptic and utopian belief in particular – on political activism, having previously written about activist responses to the war on terror (Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope, 2008) and climate change (Future Ethics, 2010). His current focus is on responses to the global extinction crisis, and the new visibility of religion and spirituality in a time of ecological emergency. He is the lead researcher on two projects about theologies and philosophies of extinction: Religion and Extinction Network (AHRC), and Thinking Through Extinction (AHRC, with Manchester Museum), and leads the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities doctoral network, Imagining and Representing Species Extinctions. He is currently writing a monograph, Eschatology and Extinction, which looks at the various ways in which end-time belief continues to inform our responses to planetary crises.

Living Lexicon Editors

Kiu-wai Chu is Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities and Chinese Studies at Nanyang Technological University. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature in University of Hong Kong, andhis previous degrees from SOAS University of LondonandUniversity of Cambridge.He was a visitingFulbrightscholarin University of Idaho, and Postdoctoral Fellows in University of Zurich and Western Sydney University. His research focuses on environmental humanities,comparative ecocriticism,and contemporary cinema and visual art in Asia. Hiswork has appearedinTransnational Ecocinema;Oxford Bibliographies, Journal of Chinese CinemasAsian Cinema; Chinese Environmental Humanities and elsewhere. 

Miriam Tola is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Lausanne where she is a member of the Institute of Geography and Sustainability. Her research explores the intersections between gender, race and materiality in political imaginaries of the environment. Her publications on subjects including the politics of the commons, the rights of nature and ecosexual documentaries have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Feminist Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Theory & Event, Environmental Humanities and Feminist Studies. She is currently completing the book The Commons Reimagined: Feminist and Decolonial Perspectives and working on an edited collection on the feminist/queer reinvention of care amidst capitalist ruins. From 2016-2018 she was on faculty at Northeastern University. Prior to her academic work, she was a film critic in Italy and the United States. Her work is available at miriamtola.org

Editorial Assistant

Gitte Westergaard is a PhD candidate in Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research interests comprise questions related to museum practices and heritage management more broadly, shaping human understanding and relation to nature. She holds a B.A. in History of Ideas and an M.A. in Sustainable Heritage Management from Aarhus University, during which she examined heritage practices in the U.S. Virgin Islands through contemporary uses of fragmented European ceramics. She is currently working with the research project ‘Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums’, where she researches the appearance of extinct insular species within museums through the lens of coloniality and narrative-building of mass extinction.

Former Editorial Team Members

Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose (founding Co-Editors), Liz DeLoughrey (Co-Editor), Marco Amiero, Julie Doyle, David Farrier, Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Asberg, Jamie Lorimer, Stephanie Posthumus, Salma Monani (Associate Editors), Kate Wright and Emily O’Gorman (Living Lexicon Editors)

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