The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program. The position will begin September 1, 2015.
The successful candidate will have a commitment to both undergraduate teaching and research; area of specialization within the humanities is open. Strong preference given to candidates with ability to teach courses on environmental ethics and history of environmental thought, an introductory course on sustainability as part of our University Studies Program, plus upper level courses in the candidate’s area of expertise. Research focus outside of North America and Western Europe preferred. The position involves advising ES majors and program building.
Ph.D. required; teaching experience preferred. Candidates should send 1) a cover letter explaining interdisciplinary range, experience, and vision for Environmental Studies, 2) a teaching statement, a list courses they can teach or would like to develop, and teaching evaluations if available; 3) research agenda; 4) curriculum vitae; 5) a writing sample; 6) transcripts (photocopies acceptable); 7) three current letters of recommendation. Send materials to Dr. Jim Feldman, Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 800 Algoma Blvd, Oshkosh WI 54901, feldmanj@uwosh.edu.
We will begin reviewing applications on October 1. UW Oshkosh is a national leader in campus sustainability in both operations and curriculum, and Environmental Studies is a vibrant, engaged, and supportive program. UW Oshkosh values diversity and is an AA/EOE institution.
Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, seeks an interdisciplinary scholar at the rank of Assistant Professor whose work is grounded in the Environmental Humanities or the Arts.
Preferred research and teaching interests include gender studies, critical studies, and/or international perspectives on environmental issues. This position begins in Fall 2015; Ph.D. in a relevant field must be completed by August 2015. Teaching responsibilities will include introductory Environmental Studies courses; the successful candidate will have opportunities to teach existing and/or create upper-division courses in her/his area of expertise. We seek an excellent teacher with demonstrated ability to facilitate active student engagement and to provide effective mentoring to undergraduate researchers.
The Environmental Studies program at Westminster College is an interdisciplinary program with concentrations in humanities, science, and the civic environment. Students are engaged in research, activism, and creative activities around the Salt Lake City urban area and across Utah. Student learning is enhanced by robust co-curricular programming through the Environmental Center, with opportunities such as the Westminster Bicycle Collective, the Organic Garden, STARS campus sustainability research, and ongoing collaborations with community partners such as Utahns Against Hunger. Since beginning less than ten years ago, the Environmental Studies major has grown to nearly 70 students and includes an impressive list of alumni accomplishments as researchers, activists, scholars, and entrepreneurs.
Westminster College’s commitment to diversity and global learning is revealed in its core values, mission and vision statements, and learning goals. We seek candidates who can demonstrate skills, experience, and potential to facilitate the learning of all students, including those historically-underrepresented in higher education (such as students of color, LGBT+ students, students with disabilities, first-generation college students, and more).
Westminster College is a private, comprehensive liberal arts college dedicated to students and their learning. Impassioned teaching and active learning are the hallmarks of the Westminster experience. Located where the magnificent Rocky Mountains meet the vibrant city of Salt Lake, Westminster blends the best of curricular and co-curricular learning via experiences presented by its unique location to help students develop skills and attributes critical for success in a rapidly changing world. The college enrolls approximately 2,200 undergraduate and 800 graduate students in four schools: School of Arts and Sciences; Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business; School of Education; and School of Nursing and Health Sciences.
Because Westminster is committed to a diversified workforce, equal opportunity, and nondiscrimination, the College prohibits any form of discrimination or harassment based on race or ethnicity, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identification, disabilities, genetic information, status as a veteran, or any other category or classification protected by applicable federal, state, or city laws. You can find more information at the college website.
My friend and colleague at the University of Oregon, Stephen Siperstein works as the assistant director of the Climate Stories Project. Stephen is encouraging everyone possible to share a brief climate change story on the group’s website. Here’s more information
provided by Stephen:
“Hello friends — in these last days of summer/first days of autumn, if you have a few minutes, please consider supporting a project I’m currently working on by recording your own climate change story (click the link to share your story).
You do not need to be a climate change expert. You do not need to have experienced the most devastating effects of climate change. You do not need to have visited a glacier or done something amazing. You only need a smartphone or computer with a microphone, a few minutes, and an interest in thinking about the effects of climate change on your own life and feelings. Please also consider sharing the link. Thanks!“
In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man.
The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film. You can check out the full list of essays at the publisher’s website: Wilfrid Laurier Press.
The Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week has once again broken ratings records, bringing millions of viewers to the wildlife television genre. However, as another Shark Week comes and goes there continue to be disturbing signs that the future of high quality wildlife filmmaking is under threat from cheaper, thrill-based programming.
As the number crunchers at the website TV by the Numbers points out: “Shark Week 2014 continues its TV domination this week (8/10/14-8/11/14) with Discovery currently ranking as the #1 primetime network in all of television* among M18-49 and P/M/W18-34 delivery – beating out all other broadcast and cable networks in these key demos. Discovery’s also earned its highest-rated Shark Week Monday ever in key demos during Prime Time with a 1.81 P25-54 rating, delivering 3.210 million viewers (Persons 2+).“
But as I discussed a year ago in a post on Discovery’s fake documentary program on the extinct Megaladon shark, Shark Week continues to be characterized by overdramatization, half-truths, and flat out false information. In a trend that has plagued the wildlife film and television genre from the earliest days of cinema, entertainment is coming at the expense of education. With the transition to computer generated images becoming cheaper, Discovery’s tactics are becoming more seductive and seemless. And while I personally have no problem with films like Sharknado 2, which are clearly packaged and promoted as entertainment, Discovery’s continued efforts to push the limits of the documentary mode are disturbing indeed.
For a more complete discussion of this topic, I highly recommend Oregonian reporter Grant Butler’s recent article, “Shark Week’s Dark Side: After Fake Documentary Controversy, Discovery Doubles Down on It’s Own Lies.” Butler interviews, Chris Palmer, a wildlife filmmaker and author of Shooting in the Wild, who runs the environmental filmmaking program at American University.
While Palmer, “points to plenty of good science showcased in Shark Week documentaries, including works by filmmakers Jeff Kurr and Andy Casagrande, who have new programs in this year’s lineup“ he also pins blame for the shift taking place in the genre squarely at the Discover Channel:
““The network will say that their programming is driven by their audience,” he says. “I don’t know what’s more distressing, the fact that the network produces these sensational, inaccurate shows, or whether the public demands them. But I hold the network responsible. They have the ability to produce responsible, exciting films, and they have to set the lead on this.”“
Advance access to a special cluster of essays to be published in the journal ISLE on the topic of ecohorror is now available online through the ISLE website.
In our introduction, SUNY-Brockport professor Carter Soles and I argue:
“As a literary and cinematic form, ecohorror has thus far been narrowly defined in popular discourse as those instances in texts when nature strikes back against humans as punishment for environmental disruption. Scholarship to this point has demonstrated that ecohorror motifs are most often found in “revenge of nature†narratives like Steven Spielberg’s iconic film Jaws (1975) but may also occur in less overtly ecocritical works. A more expansive definition of ecohorror, which we would like to elucidate via this special cluster of essays, includes analyses of texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world, or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/non-human distinctions more broadly. Ecohorror, which assumes that environmental disruption is haunting humanity’s relationship to the non-human world, is present in a broad set of texts grappling with ecocritical matters, and therefore this concentrated study is necessary to sketch out the boundaries of this important new area of ecocritical study.”
Essays included in the cluster are as follows:
Introduction: Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We’ll All Be Dead (Stephen Rust and Carter Soles)
Beyond Ecophilia: Edgar Allan Poe and the American Tradition of Ecohorror (Sara L. Crosby)
“And No Birds Singâ€: Discourses of Environmental Apocalypse in The Birds and Night of the Living Dead (Carter Soles)
Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman and New Materialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s Parasite (Christy Tidwell)
Comfortably Numb: Material Ecocriticism and the Postmodern Horror Film (Stephen Rust)
Horror Comics Ecology: Metonymy and Iconicity in Charles Burns’s Black Hole (Kom Kunyosying)
“Wheels within Wheels,” Ecology, and the Horrors of Mechanophobia (Andrew Hageman)
Call for Abstracts for Edited Collection on Foreign Language Teaching and the Enviroment
May be of interest to those of you who teach ecomedia topics in foreign language departments.
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS, Deadline: September 1, 2014.
Essay proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA’s series Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, under the title Foreign Language Teaching and the Environment: Theory, Curricula, Institutional Structures, to be edited by Charlotte Melin (University of Minnesota). The goal of this volume is to provide an introduction to teaching sustainability and
environmental humanities topics in language, literature, and culture courses.
For a full description and call, see
http://www.mla.org/tllc_fl_teaching_and_environment
Abstracts of 250-300 words and CVs should be sent to the volume editor by 1 September 2014.
Please send inquiries and e-mail submissions to Charlotte Melin (melin005@umn.edu) using the subject line “FL Teaching & Environment.†Surface-mail submissions can be sent to Professor Melin, Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch, 320 Folwell Hall, University of Minnesota, 9 Pleasant St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455.
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Call for Papers
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Notes from Underground: The Depths of Environmental Arts, Culture and Justice |
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Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Eleventh Biennial Conference, June 23- 27, 2015 University of Idaho Moscow, Idaho  THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE (INCLUDING SUBMISSIONS PAGE) WILL BE LIVE IN SEPTEMBER, 2014  Download the CFP (PDF File)Â
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Already even then I had my underground world in my soul. –         Fyodor Dostoyevsky  It is a marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould … has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms. –         Charles Darwin  Keystone XL will not cross Lakota treaty territory…. Their horses are ready. So are ours. –         Honor the Earth
In Notes from Underground (1864), Dostoyevsky explores relations between modernity and its discontents at an important historical conjuncture: the novella’s unnamed, unpleasant hero rails against capitalist industry, imperialist architecture and an emerging social scientific understanding of human behaviour premised on predictability and knowability. By writing from the underground – from the subterranean, from the murk, from the world of refuse – Dostoyevsky asks us to consider the importance of experiences that lie beneath (and both before and after) the shiny edifices of progress, rationality and industry. But the “underground” also asks us to consider what lies beneath us much more literally: crust, tectonic plates, magma, minerals, fossil fuels, aquifers, lakes, caves, fungal networks, clay, compost, worms, ants, nematodes, roots, rhizomes, tubers, seeds, warrens, nests, vaults, graves, landfills, nuclear weapons and waste, buried treasure. In this act of collection – underground elements, underground agents, underground movements, underground epistemologies – we hope to draw attention to the multiple ways in which things underground and the institutions that variously cultivate, harness and contain them, are constantly changing the terrain (literally and politically) on which we stand.
Especially in the midst of such widespread focus on atmospheric climate change, perhaps we also need to look down, under, beneath and below for imaginative aesthetic, critical, pedagogical and activist responses? At our current political and ecological conjuncture, the literal underground is very much the subject of contest – extraction, pollution, depletion, neoliberalisation, cultivation, sovereignty, equity, (re)claiming – suggesting the need for creative new ways of engaging in activism, reading, writing and education in these networks of depth: underground arts, humanities, ecocriticism, justice. For the 2015 ASLE conference, we seek proposals for panels, papers, performances, discussions, readings and roundtables that address this constellation of undergrounds. We invite participants to interpret the conference theme as broadly as possible and to imagine their work in terms not only of underground content but also of subterranean form: we particularly encourage non-traditional modes of presentation, including hybrid, performative and collaborative works; panels that minimize formal presentation in favour of engaged emergent discussion; interdisciplinary approaches; environmentally inflected (earthy?) readings of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, film, theatre and other media; and proposals from outside the academic humanities, including submissions from artists, writers, teachers, practitioners, activists and colleagues in the social and natural sciences. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:
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