Environmental Futures

Caren Irr is professor of English and Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University. She is the author or editor of seven previous books, among them Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty- First Century and The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s.

Roberto Forns-Broggi, Ph.D., is a professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He was born in Lima, Peru and speaks Spanish fluently. Forns-Broggi has been teaching at MSU Denver since 1998. He is the faculty chair for the Modern Language Department Committee. Forns-Broggi also taught at Universidad Nacionla de Cordoba in Cordoba, Argentina for 13 years. He has taught classes about intercultural communication through literature and film; literary and cultural theory; creative writing and children’s literature. Forns-Broggi received his doctorate in Spanish language and literature from Arizona State University in 1995.

Kurt holds a PhD in American Literature from Brandeis University, with a focus on modern and contemporary print and screen culture. His research has been published in the journals College Literature, Post45, and Arizona Quarterly, as well as the edited collections Reading Modernism with Machines (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Literature and Event (Routledge 2021). Most recently, he has served as the North America section editor for The Environmental Futures Reader (forthcoming from Brandeis UP 2024), a global anthology of contemporary climate fiction.

Cajetan Iheka specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He serves as director of the Whitney Humanities Center, chair of the Council on African Studies, and head of the Africa Initiative at Yale. Professor Iheka is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His latest single-authored book is African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021). The monograph, which positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure, received six book prizes. Among other accolades, African Ecomedia won the 2022 African Studies Association Best Book Prize (formerly Herskovits Book Prize), the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association. He is also editor of the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022); and coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (University of Rochester Press, 2018), and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today.

Professor Iheka is currently working on a comparative study of the cultural and formal intimacies of African and Caribbean literatures. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee is professor of Anglophone world-literature at Oxford University. He researches across four interrelated fields – colonial and postcolonial literatures, environmental humanities, world-literary studies, and Victorian studies. He is the author of five monographs – Crime Fiction and Empire (2003); Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010); Natural Disasters and Victorian Imperial Culture (2013); Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (with the Warwick Research Collective, 2015); and Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020, winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s 2021 Book Award). He has also edited three essay collections and anthologies, and written a wide range of articles in leading academic journals. He co-edits Palgrave Macmillan’s book series New Comparisons in World Literature. He is currently developing a project on anti-colonial world literatures, and working with colleagues at the New School of the Anthropocene in London to develop the role of arts and humanities in popular understanding of climate change. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

Shaobo Xie is professor of English at the University of Calgary. He teaches literary theory, postcolonial literature and theory, and translation studies. His articles have appeared in journals such as Boundary 2, New Literary History, Cultural Critique, Telos, Neohelicon, Semiotica, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Science & Society, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, and International Social Science Journal. Among his recent publications are “Translation and Globalization,”“Green Religion as a Way of Life: Thoreau and his Ecocentric Aesthetics of Existence,” “Chinese Beginnings of Cosmopolitanism: A Genealogical Critique of Tianxia Guan,” and “Tao, Parrhe¯sia and the Chinese Intellectual.”

Nik Chartrand is a second-year MA English Literature student and ENGL 250 instructor from Winnipeg, Canada. She graduated from the University of North Dakota in 2018 with a BA in English Literature and a Certificate of Editing and Publishing. Her research interests focus primarily on postcolonialism, Caribbean literature, and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on her thesis which focuses on defiant female narratives under dictatorships in the Caribbean during the 20th century. When she’s not in class or teaching, you can find Nik with headphones on, reading the latest YA fantasy novel around campus coffee shops.

Irina Sadovina is a cultural scientist and researcher of contemporary culture. She is currently working on a study of Vedic femininity as part of the project PUT670 Vernacular Interpretations of the Incomprehensible: Folkloristic Perspectives Towards Uncertainty (Estonian Research Council of the University of Tartu). She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto in 2018 and a second PhD in Literature and Cultural Research from the University of Tartu in 2020 (In Search of Vedic Wisdom: Forms of Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary Russia). She has published on various aspects of contemporary culture, including alternative spirituality in Russia, in such journals as Journal of Contemporary Religion, Nova Religio, and Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, as well as in the monograph Contesting Authority: Vernacular Knowledge and Alternative Belief. She teaches at the University of Sheffield.