Workshop Leaders
Sidney I. Dobrin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, where for ten years he directed the writing program. He teaches courses in writing theory, visual rhetoric, and environmental rhetoric. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and numerous articles about those subjects. His current research involves the intersection of visual rhetoric and posthumanism. Forthcoming and recent publications include articles in Environmental Education Research, Defining Composition Studies: Research, Scholarship, and Inquiry for the Twenty-First Century (ed. Kelly Ritter), and Ecosee: Image, Nature and Visual Rhetoric (co-edited with Sean Morey).
Salma Monani is Assistant Professor at Gettysburg College’s Environmental Studies department. As a humanities scholar her research and teaching include explorations in literary ecocriticism and cine-ecocriticism. She is currently co-editing The Ecocinema Reader with Sean Cubitt and Steve Rust (Routledge Press). Other projects include the co-edited special collection, “Coloring the Environmental Lens: Cinema, New Media and Just Sustainability,” for Environmental Communication: The Journal of Nature and Culture (2011, 5.1); articles that analyze the representation of minorities in ecomedia (for example, “John Sayles’s Honeydripper: African Americans and the Environment.” ISLE 18.1 (2011): 1-25); as well as “Just Food?” A Community Rethinks Sustainability,” an examination of the developing local foods movement in Adams County, an agriculturally rich rural area that also suffers from high food insecurity.
Participants and Position Paper Titles
Erika Berroth. Animals, Landscapes and Humans in the Work of Werner Herzog: Developing Epistemologies in Docu-Fiction Eco-Cinema.
Erika Berroth, Associate Professor of German and Chair of the Chinese, French and German Programs at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, earned her Ph.D. in German from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She contributes to promoting environmental literacy by integrating Environmental Studies and Feminist Studies with the curriculum in Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and by supporting study abroad projects of Environmental Studies Fellows. Recent research projects include a study of the work of Werner Herzog and a book project on transnational literature and literature of migration.
Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez. Moving Beyond Spectatorial Distance and the Objectifying Gaze: Ecocinema’s Engaged Lens of Placefulness.
Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez is Caterpillar Inc. Professor of English at Bradley University where she teaches Native American literatures, environmental literatures, ecocomposition, folklore, and literary criticism and theory. Author of Wittgenstein and Critical Theory (1995), Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (1999), and Native American Life-History Narratives (2007), with Evelina Zuni Lucero, she co-edited Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance (2009). Currently, Professor Brill de Ramírez is exploring the concepts of the conversive and “geographies of belonging” in Indigenous and diasporic literatures. A born again prosodist, Dr. Brill de Ramírez is bringing to bear her training in poetics and prosody to investigate the literary rhetoric of place that facilitates reader engagement with diverse worlds, cultures, places, and times.
Yalan Chang. Aesthetics, Ethics and Empowerment in The Cove
Yalan Chang is an assistant professor in Department of Foreign Languages and Literature in Huafan University (Buddhist University) in Taiwan. Her current interests include: ecofeminism, environmental ethics, environmental justice and activism, and animal studies. Yalan Chang received her Ph.D. in Western Languages and Literature in 2009 from Tamkang University, Taiwan. Her doctorial dissertation is entitled “Nature, Gender, and Risk: Margaret Atwood, Linda Hogan, and Karen Tei Yamashita.” Her latest published article is “Greening the Everyday: Barbara Kingsolver’s Ecocritical Praxis and Sustainable Reinhabitation in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” (2011).
John Claborn. Ecocinema and the Color Line.
John Claborn is a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is currently finishing a dissertation called “Ecology of the Color Line: Race and Nature in American Literature, 1895-1941.” His research and teaching interests include American literature after the Civil War, critical theory, and cinema studies. John’s work has appeared in Callaloo, English Language Notes, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Critical and Cultural Theory. His work is forthcoming in ISLE.
Barbara Cook. Eco-hero/heroine/s of Environmental Justice: Hollywood Spins the Tales.
Barbara J. Cook is an Associate Professor at Mount Aloysius College where she teaches literature (American, World Comparative, Native American, Women Writers) and women’s studies. Her Ph.D. in English with Women’s Studies and Literature & Environment concentrations is from University of Oregon. She was awarded a Publication prize from Colorado Endowment for the Humanities for the collection, From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan (2003). Other publications include: Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View (2008); guest co-edition, Studies in American Indian Literatures (2007); contributor, Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination (2003), John Graves, Writer (2007); articles in Northwest Review, American Indian Quarterly, Southwest American Literature.
Brian Cope. Ecoseeing Greenwash: Revealing the Heuretics of Hidden Agendas.
Brian Cope is a doctoral candidate in the Composition and TESOL program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation, “The Ecologic Episteme: A Pathway to a Literacy of Sustainability,” is a historically contextualized study on ecologic thinking in composition and writing studies. His essay on environmental perception in Western Pennsylvania was published in Literature, Writing, and the Natural World (2010). He has presented his eco-English research at national and regional conferences and is actively involved in numerous local campaigns to protect Western PA forestlands and watersheds. For over 10 years, he has been providing pathways for his college writing students to think and act in ecologic ways.
Heidi Danzl. Adam Smith’s Concept of Compassion in Ecocosmopolitanism.
Jennifer Griggs. Viewing Ecology: Re-framing Nature and (Re)Mediating Life.
Jenn Griggs is an emerging scholar at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning, within the Landscape Architecture program. Her focus is looking at the ways environmental design, visual culture, animal studies, and “toxic discourses” can cohere and unravel traditional ideas of nature and representation in the living world. She has presented this body of work, Coherences, at NiCHE, SLSA and now ASLE. Acknowledging her life will always be full of polluted landscapes, urban remediation design, and alley cats the future looks engaging and hopeful.
Heidi Hutner. Nuclear Mothers, Nuclear Films.
Heidi Hutner is Associate Professor of English, at SUNY Stony Brook. Hutner is working on two books on ecofeminism, literature and film-–one is an environmental cancer memoir and cultural critique (inlcuding discussions of nuclear bombs, toxics, and other pollutants), entitled Strawberry Fields NOT, and the other is a critical analysis of mothering and ecofeminism in literature, culture, and film, entitled, Polluting Mama: Ecofeminism, Literature, Pedagogy, and Film (Demeter Press, 2012). Hutner is the author of numerous articles on ecofeminism, and her books include (author) Colonial Women: Race and Restoration Drama (Oxford UP, 2001), (editor) Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, Criticism (University of Virginia, 1993), and (editor-with Nicole Garret) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (Broadview Press, 2011). Also, see her blog: http://ecofeminism-mothering.blogspot.com/
Elizabeth Latosi-Sawin. Blown, Burnt and Swept Away by Nonfictional Realities.
Elizabeth Latosi-Sawin, Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Missouri Western State University, is also Co-Director of the Outdoor Semester, a semester-long, multi-disciplinary, theme-based, faculty-student learning community that offers a significant field experience on the Great Plains. Courses have been organized around themes such as Interpreting Our Heritage through Native American Values, Lewis and Clark & the Corps of Discovery, Westward Trails, and Energy & Life. The study of energy in 2009 took us to the Land Institute (KS), the National Renewable Energy Lab (CO), Rocky Mountain Pellet Company (WY), Yellowstone National Park, the Bighorn Mountains, the Black Hills (SD), Oahe Hydroelectric Plant and Cooper Nuclear Power Station (NE). Hiking, camping, horse-back riding, rock climbing, canoeing, white-water rafting, star-gazing, meeting Native Americans, dancing at powwows, and participating in sweats are among the activities we have participated in over the years. Courses associated with the program have been Outdoor Education, Research Writing, Literature, Physical Geography, Social Anthropology, Psychology, and Music. We have presented at national conferences in Health, Physical Education & Recreation, Environmental History, Geography, Conservation Biology, College Composition & Communication, College English Association, National Collegiate Honors Council, and the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. Our purpose has always been to expand our understanding of the different relationships that human beings have with the natural world.
Nicole Seymour. Searching for Alternative Affective Modes in Ecomedia.
Nicole Seymour received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville, where she teaches courses in American literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and cultural studies. She has published articles on author Carson McCullers, filmmaker Michael Haneke, and environmental justice and queer cinema in journals such as PostScript and Cinema Journal. She has recently completed a book manuscript titled Strange Natures: The Ecological Imagination of Contemporary Queer Fictions. Her current work focuses on the use of irony in environmentalist rhetoric.
Alexa Weik von Mossner. Moving Ecocinema: The Emotional Appeal of Risk Narratives.
Alexa Weik von Mossner is a Postdoctoral Assistant in American Literature and Culture at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and currently also a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. She worked for several years in the German film and television industry before earning her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. Her essays have appeared in the African American Review, English Studies, Environmental Communication, Ecozona, and in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Her current research focuses on environmental risk narratives in American popular culture.
Paula Willoquet-Maricondi. Eco-documentaries and the Sustainability Movement.
Paula Willoquet-Maricondi is Associate Professor and Chair of the Media Arts Department at Marist College. She coordinates the Cinema Studies Minor and Co-Chairs the Campus Sustainability Advisory Committee. She is the editor of three books, including Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film recently published by the University of Virginia Press as part of their series “Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism.” Her essays have appeared in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Postmodern Culture, Cinema Journal, Film/ Literature Quarterly, and Literature Interpretation Theory. Her current research focuses on campus sustainability.