Catherine Engh received her Ph.D. in English in 2020 from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation addresses Romantic concepts of natural education and she has a strong secondary interest in contemporary literature and its relationship to environmental justice. She has taught general education courses in both literature and writing at a range of institutions, including Hunter College, Siena College, and University at Albany. Her research in British Romanticism has been published in English Language Notes and is forthcoming in European Romantic Review and The Wordsworth Circle. She served as a co-chair of the Ecocriticism Public Working Group at the Graduate Center, funded in part by the Doctoral Student Council and the Center for the Humanities, and she co-organized this syllabus project with Christina Katopodis.
Rebecca Fullan received her Ph.D. in English in 2020 from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary Native American literature, and her research interests range from medieval mysticism to speculative fiction, and include feminism and queer studies, critical race studies, and ecocriticism. Fullan has a Master’s in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and an AB in Comparative Literature from Bryn Mawr College. She has taught Composition and Literature courses at John Jay College and LaGuardia Community College.
Christina Katopodis is Associate Director and Postdoctoral Research Associate of Transformative Learning in the Humanities at the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in English in February 2021 from The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the winner of the 2019 Diana Colbert Innovative Teaching Prize and the 2018 Dewey Digital Teaching Award. Katopodis’s research has been supported by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Research Grant (2016), and two consecutive GC Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants (2016-18). She records sounds at Walden Pond for her digital humanities project, The Walden Soundscape, an award-winning website that makes sounds at Walden Pond accessible to a wide audience, and calls for a new approach to reading as listening to a text. With Cathy N. Davidson, she is the author of The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022).
Kaitlin Mondello is assistant professor of Ecostudies at Millersville University. Her research focuses on environmental literature, science, and philosophy in the nineteenth century and their relevance to current debates about climate change and the Anthropocene. She is a member of the Climate Action Lab and founded the Ecocriticism Public Working Group through The Center for the Humanities at CUNY. Her scholarly work in Science Studies and Animal Studies has appeared in Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies (Lexington Books, 2016) and Essays in Romanticism (2017). She is also the editor of the blog Visible Pedagogy.
Alexander Schlutz is associate professor of English at the Graduate Center and John Jay College at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he coordinated the interdisciplinary Sustainability and Environmental Justice program program from 2014 to 2020. His research and teaching interests include questions in British and German Romanticism, literature and ecology, and environmental justice. He is the author of Mind’s World. Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism, winner of the 2009 International Conference on Romanticism’s Jean-Pierre Barricelli Award for the best book in Romanticism studies, and he is associate editor of the journal Essays in Romanticism. His essays have appeared in leading Romanticism journals, edited collections, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.
Megan Wiessner is a doctoral student in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her art and academic research both focus on the feedback between material environments and aesthetic experiences, and on the environmental and cultural politics of design in architecture and textiles. This work investigates how humans live out their relationships with their environments through sensory dispositions and representational practices as well as through explicit narratives. She holds an MSc in Human Geography from the University of Oxford.
Eric Dean Wilson joins the English Department of Wagner College in Fall 2023 as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and American Literature. He earned his doctorate in English with a certificate in American Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY for his work on environmental literature. His dissertation, “The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological,” examines how contemporary American personal essays in an ecological mode can help us better understand the boundaries of the self in literary nonfiction. Reading works by Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Francis, and David Wojnarowicz, Wilson’s dissertation invokes queer ecology as a method for understanding the self as more varied and communal than Western liberalism assumes. Wilson comes to academia as a working writer and literary artist. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School and is the author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort (Simon & Schuster, 2021). His essays, poems, interviews, and criticism have appeared in Time, BOMB, Esquire, The Baffler, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Tin House, among other publications. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, Citizens Climate Radio, and elsewhere. He’s currently working on a collection of essays that use the unique geographic history of Brooklyn in order to explore ideas about queer space and ecological mourning. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he now lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
