Our Members

Dr. Rachele Dini

Founder of the International Literary Waste Studies network Rachele Dini is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Roehampton, where she teaches twentieth-century and contemporary Ango-American literature. Her first book, Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), was the first treatment of waste across twentieth-century Anglo-European prose fiction. Her second book, “All-Electric Narratives”: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020 (Bloomsbury, 2021), examines US writers’ engagements with the racialised, gendered, and class-based meanings of household gadgets. She has published articles on waste in Donald Barthelme (European Journal of American Studies 2016); J.G. Ballard’s postmillennial fiction (C21 Lit: Journal of 21st-century Literature 2017); Alison Lurie’s early fiction (Journal of American Studies 2017); 1960s and 70s “mad housewife” fiction (Textual Practice 2018); Don DeLillo’s Underworld (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 2019); and J.G. Ballard’s climate fiction (ISLE 2019). Between 2018 and 2020, she was a guest contributor to Rice University’s seminar series, “Waste: Histories and Futures,” an interdisciplinary project bringing together waste studies scholars across the humanities and social sciences. She is on the editorial board of Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-Horror and the Eco-Gothic and Ancillary Review of Books: Literature, Culture, Power, Speculation, and is the editor of Queer Trash and Feminist Excretions: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020 (SUNY Press, 2022). She is currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project, Cleaning Through Crisis: Political Upheaval and the Advertising of Domestic Hygiene, 1963-2023, which examines the influence of socio-political crises on UK and US cleaning product ads, and a book, Postmillennial Nostalgia: Mid-Century Design and the Politics of Longing, on the political ramifications of the popularity of mid-century period dramas and interior design in contemporary culture.

Prof. Susan Signe Morrison

Susan Signe Morrison, Professor of English at Texas State University, writes on topics lurking in the margins of history. In addition to dozens of articles, her books on medieval waste and excrement—Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (Palgrave Macmillan 2008), The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (Palgrave Macmillan 2015)—have expanded the historical dimension of waste studies to include the Middle Ages. She is committed to bringing the hidden lives of women to a wider audience through such books as Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (Routledge 2000), A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages (Oxbow 2015), and the award-winning novel, Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife (Top Hat 2015). Susan edited her mother’s diaries as Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America (Chicago Review Press 2013). Blogs: susansignemorrison.com, homefrontgirldiary.com, amedievalwomanscompanion.com.

Prof. Stephanie Foote

Stephanie Foote is the Jackson and Nichols Chair and Professor of English at West Virginia University, where she researches and teaches American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present with a particular focus on environmental issues.  With Dana Luciano and Anthony Lioi, she is the co-editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, which she co-founded with Stephanie. Foote is the author of two single-author books The Parvenu’s Plot (2014) and Regional Fictions (2001),  co-editor (with Elizabeth Mazzolini) of Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice (2012), and co-editor (with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen) of The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities (2022). Her current book project, The Art of Waste, argues that one particular kind of garbage –the detritus of everyday life — is the richest, most concentrated text of the Anthropocene. In it we can trace the histories of the global and local circulation and transformation of raw material, the human costs of making, using, and discarding commodities, and the intense anxiety about personal responsibility toward environmental catastrophe that has become a hallmark of contemporary American life.  Foote’s work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. 

Prof. Rachel DiNitto

Rachel DiNitto is department head of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon. Her current research focuses on the literary and cultural responses to the triple disaster of March 11, 2011 in Japan—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns. In addition to her new book,  Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscapes of Japan’s Triple Disaster (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), she has published on the film and manga of this disaster and postwar Japan. Recently published and forthcoming articles include: “The Fukushima Fiction Film: Gender and the Discourse of Nuclear Containment” (The Asia-Pacific Journal), “Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3/11: The Debris of Post-Fukushima Literature and Film” (Japan Forum Special Issue Beyond Fukushima: Culture, Media, and Meaning from Catastrophe), and chapters in Negotiating Disaster: “Fukushima” and the Arts (Routledge 2017) and The Japanese Cinema Book (British Film Institute/Bloomsbury 2020).

Prof. Maurizia Boscagli

Maurizia Boscagli is Professor of English and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focuses on 20^th and 21^st century Anglophone literature and culture; Modernism; contemporary critical theory; feminist and queer theory; materialism, Marxism and Autonomism; migration, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. She is the author of Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Westview 1996), and Stuff Theory. Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (Bloomsbury 2014). She is the translator of Antonio Negri’ book Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (University of Minnesota Press 2009). Boscagli is also the director of COMMA the Center on Modern Culture, Materialism and Aesthetics at UC Santa Barbara. Her current research includes a new manuscript on the refusal of work and the politics of not doing.

Dr. William Viney

William Viney is Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury 2014) and  Twins: A History of Superstitions and Marvels, Fantasies and Experiments (Reaktion, 2020). Other work has appeared in Critical Quarterly, Textual Practice, and BMJ: Medical Humanities. His current research supports the medical humanities project ‘People Like You’: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation. He tweets @WillViney.

Dr. Christopher Schmidt

Christopher Schmidt is a Professor of English at City University of New York, at LaGuardia Community College and in the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies at CUNY Graduate Center, where he regularly teaches on waste and new materialisms. He has published a book on waste in twentieth-century literature, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, Goldsmith (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and two articles on waste in the visual arts: “Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Garbage and the Aesthetics of Poverty” (ArtMargins/mitpressjournals.org 2017) and “Warhol’s Problem Project: The Time Capsules” (Postmodern Culture 2015). He is currently finishing a project on queer tropical landscape. He is also the author of a book of poems, The Next in Line (Slope Editions 2008), and his writing has also appeared in Contemporary Literature, Art Bulletin, SubStance, Tin House, and Bookforum.

Dr. Mary Foltz

Mary C. Foltz is an Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. Her monograph titled Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), analyses post-1960 scatological novels that utilize representations of human waste to address pressing issues, including pollution of waterways, environmental racism, and militarism. Primarily examining postmodern parody, the book shows the value of aesthetic renderings of sanitary engineering for composting ideologies that fuel ruinous impact on the world as well as human others. Drawing on mid-century psychoanalytic thinkers Norman O. Brown and Frantz Fanon, American Sh*t shows the influence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking through subject development on excremental fiction and its continued relevance for literary studies, especially in relationship to waste studies. Ultimately, the monograph reveals how novelists Ishmael Reed, Jonathan Franzen, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Samuel R. Delany critique subjects who abnegate their status as waste-producing beings and bring readers back to embrace the filthy body, worldly embodiment, and human connectivity to each other. Foltz has published articles on waste in SubStance and Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies. She currently serves as a reviewer of literary criticism focused on post-45 U.S. literature for Year’s Work in English Studies.

Dr. Caroline Knighton

Caroline Knighton’s research focuses primarily on the intersections of waste and gender in literary modernism and the historical avant-garde. Her book, Modernist Wastes: Recovery, Reuse and the Autobiographic in Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Djuna Barnes (Bloomsbury, 2020), is preoccupied by questions of canonicity, textual mess and women’s self-representational practices, and explores the ways in which waste functions at once as a gendered strategy of containment in modernist discourse, and a radically disruptive mode of re-making. Caroline has lectured on a range of topics related to modernism, the body and the historical avant-garde, and has published work on Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Lorighoven. Before the completion of her PhD at Birkbeck in 2014, she was the co-convenor of the Djuna Barnes Research Seminar in London, and co-organiser of the First International Djuna Barnes Conference, held in 2012.

Dr. Annabel Kim

Annabel L. Kim is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and French at Harvard University. She is interested in feminist writing and theory, the novel (in particular, the contemporary novel), and, more broadly, the ethical and political implications of writing and reading fiction. Kim’s first book, Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (Ohio State University Press, 2018), uses the collective corpus of Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta to theorize a feminist poetics that hollows out difference and reworks our subjectivities so that we can break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. Kim is currently working on a second book, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon, which examines the deeply excremental nature of the modern and contemporary French canon and works to combat the deodorization of the French literary imaginary. Cacaphonies argues that the canon’s abundant excrementality both serves as the ground for conceptualizing what kind of material literature is and is the material by which canonical texts break down the very idea of the canon that would contain them to liberate them. In addition to these book projects, Kim has published articles on contemporary French fiction in Studies in 20^th– and 21^st-Century Literature, diacritics, PMLA, and French Studies.

Dr. Tara Prescott-Johnson

Tara Prescott-Johnson is a Lecturer in Writing Programs and Faculty in Residence at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Bucknell University Press), editor of Neil Gaiman in the 21^st Century (McFarland), and co-editor of Gender and the Superhero Narrative (University Press of Mississippi). Other recent publications have been featured in Women’s Studies and European Joyce Studies. Her research interests include twentieth-century American literature, modernism, poetry, comics and graphic novels, popular culture, feminist theory, and James Joyce. tprescot@ucla.edu

Dr. Lydia Wistisen

Lydia Wistisen is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research and teaching focuses on children’s and young adult literature. She is the author of Gångtunneln: Urbana erfarenheter i svensk ungdomslitteratur*(ellerströms, 2017) and a part of the board for Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics. She has published one article on waste in Barbro Lindgren’s children’s books, “Leken i antropocen: Skräpestetik i Barbro Lindgrens Loranga, Masarin och Dartanjang (1969) och Loranga, Loranga (1970)”** (Barnboken, 2018),  and is currently working on a project on trash thematics, waste aesthetics, and environmental ethics in Swedish children’s culture, 1967–1979.

*The Underpass: Urban Experiences in Swedish Young Adult Literature, 1890-2010 ** “Play in the Anthropocene: Garbage Aesthetics in Barbro Lindgren’s Loranga, Masarin and Dartanjang (1969) and Loranga, Loranga (1970)”

Dr. Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Ph.D, Chicago, 2018) is Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico State University. Their research spans twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. and Canadian literary, media, screen, and performance cultures; the environmental and medical humanities; and feminist, queer, and trans studies. They are completing a monograph, Breathing Aesthetics, which addresses minoritarian aesthetic responses to a contemporary crisis in breathing. With Drew Strombeck, they are editing Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (SUNY Press), a collection that asks how the recent avant-gardes have mediated a crisis in the reproduction of life that includes resource depletion and toxic saturation. Within waste studies, Jean-Thomas is particularly interested in matters of air pollution; epidemiology and toxicology; disability, debility, and illness; and ecofeminism as well as queer and trans environmentalisms. They have published in Women & Performance; New Review of Film and Television Studies; New Review of Film and Television Studies; Criticism; Critical Inquiry; Los Angeles Review of Books; Chicago Review; Review 31; Make Magazine; The Oxonian Review; and Public Books.

Personal website: http://jttremblay.wordpress.com 

Dr. Steven Swarbrick

Steven Swarbrick is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. He specializes in English Renaissance literature, queer theory, and environmental humanities. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Postmodern Culture, Journal of Narrative Theory, Journal for Cultural Research, Early Modern Culture, Criticism, postmedieval, Exemplaria, and Spenser Studies, as well as in several edited anthologies, including Queer Milton (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). His current book project is titled Materialism without Matter: Environmental Poetics from Spenser to Milton. He is also working on a second book project, titled Shakespeare’s Earth: Elements, Affects, Climate Politics. Other ongoing projects include a book manuscript on the political ontology of Gilles Deleuze, provisionally titled Deleuze and the Intolerable: Cinema at the End of the World, and a special issue of Criticism on Renaissance posthumanism, co-edited with Karen Raber. He has also published several essays on early modern literature and disability. He received his Ph.D. in English from Brown University in 2016. Before joining the Baruch faculty, he was a postdoctoral fellow in English at Tulane University. Steven’s areas of interest in waste studies include energy waste in literature and film; queer waste in psychoanalysis/deconstruction; waste aesthetics; and ecologies of waste. steven.swarbrick@baruch.cuny.edu; www.stevenswarbrick.com

Dr. Orchid Tierney

Orchid Tierney is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. Her research engages with the environmental humanities and twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry and art, with a specific focus on atmospheric pollution, waste management, plastic wastes, literary recycling, extraction, and the more-than-human world. Her current book project, Gaseous Modernity: Bad Air in the Anthropocene, attends to atmospheres and atmospheric pollution as transnational encounters. She has published several chapbooks of poetry, and her first collection, a year of misreading the wildcats, explores oil imaginaries and plastic pollution. Her scholarship, reviews, and poetry have also appeared in Jacket2, Journal of Modern Literature, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

Dr. Rebecca Falkoff

Rebecca Falkoff is Assistant Professor in Italian Studies at NYU. Her work focuses on modern and contemporary Italian literature, as well as the history of science, medicine and technology. She is the author of Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding (Cornell University Press, 2021), and has written about waste in “Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Professional Alchemy, or How to Make Bread from Air and Literature from Science” (Journal of Romance Studies), which was awarded the Romance Studies Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers. 

Prof. Annabel Mooney

Annabel Mooney is Professor of Language and Society in the Department of Media, Culture, and Languages at the University of Roehampton. She is currently in the process of moving from research on the language of money and debt to the language of waste. Both projects focus on the language used by or to ‘ordinary’ people in order to better understand human culture, communication and relationships with the world. Her previous work dealt with human rights, the body and language. This work provides an answer to the quest for a universal foundation for human rights. She has also conducted some research on spoken signs and past work includes research in the fields of HIV/AIDS and quality of life, globalisation and marginal religious movements. 

Prof. Theodora Tsimpouki

Theodora Tsimpouki is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She specializes in American realism, modernism, postmodernism, the 1960s, theories of space, and contemporary literary theory. She is co-editor of Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the US and Culture Agonistes: Debating Cultures, Rereading Texts. Her recent published research includes articles on Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, American Exceptionalism, American ideology of space, and literary waste studies. She has also edited a special issue of the e-journal, European Journal of American Studies, on “Sustainability and the American City” and co-edited The War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). She is Book Review editor of the European Journal of American Studies.

Dr. Ti-Han Chang

Ti-han Chang is lecturer in Asia Pacific Studies at the School of Language & Global Studies at UCLan. Dr. Chang’s research focuses on postcolonial environmental literature, applying philosophical and theoretical approaches to the study of environmental issues and politics. Her other research interests are migrant literature, aboriginal literature and socio-political movements in the context of Taiwan studies.

Dr Chang is a board member of the Francophone Association of Taiwan Studies; a member of the European Association of Taiwan Studies; a staff researcher of the Northern Institute of Taiwan Studies; a staff researcher at the Research Centre for Migration and Diaspora; a staff researcher at China Studies. She is also a research fellow at the European Research Centre on Contemporary Taiwan at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Dr. Treasa De Loughry

Treasa De Loughry is Lecturer in World Literature at University College Dublin. Her first book, The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), looks at cultural registrations of waste and toxicity in world literature, or how environmentally damaging policies of waste exportation to global peripheries, like e-waste and plastic in various sites in North America, Asia and Africa, have led to politically urgent and experimental work, which in turns requires new critical evaluations of the intersections between medical and environmental humanities, and waste/ discard studies. Other recent publications include “Petromodernity, petro-finance and plastic in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing 2017) and “Polymeric chains and petrolic imaginaries: world literature, plastic, and negative value” (Green Letters 2019). Her research interests include the contemporary global novel, ecopoetry, and postcolonial and world literary approaches to waste, energy, and food, particularly in relation to China, South East Asia, North America, and West Africa.

Dr. Sarah Ensor

Sarah Ensor is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is currently finishing her first book, Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity, which takes a range of queer practices characterized by nominal futurelessness as inspiration for a model of environmental care that brackets questions of longevity and allows us to glimpse the immanent ethical possibilities of the present. Her work has been published in American Literature, Environmental Humanities, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, among other venues. With Scotti Parrish, she is co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment. From 2012-2017, she was Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University in Portland, OR. 

Dr. Allison Turner

Allison Turner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. Her book-in-progress, The Salvaging Disposition: Waste and the Novel Form, considers the interaction of byproduct waste and literary form in a series of works traditionally associated with the rise of the novel in British literature. In the project, she traces the modern concept of waste-as-byproduct back to the period of early modernity, when Baconian science and European colonialism began to conceive of the New World as an untapped spring of inexhaustible resources. Alongside this ideology of infinite growth, she argues that the period also witnessed a surge of interest in byproduct waste as a site of potential value. Allison’s research and teaching interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone literatures, the environmental humanities, and global/empire studies. Allison was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rice University Humanities Research Center, where she was a core participant in a multidisciplinary seminar on “Waste: Histories and Futures.” 

Dr. Anna Reynolds

Anna Reynolds is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of St Andrews. She is interested in the historically-specific valences of the term waste in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in contemporary culture. her research to-date has focused on one specific waste object – waste paper – and its rich imaginative, material, and monetary value in early modern England. Her future research will explore how the complex and unexpected dimensions of early modern waste matter contradict and commingle with our own understanding of unwanted, useless, and potentially toxic stuff. She is especially keen to test further the idea of waste as a “concrete metaphor” or “thing to think with,” that prompts a particular understanding of the body and its relationship to time and the environment.  Publications include “Waste Paper in Early Modern England,” in The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Materials, Networks (Brill 2020); “Paper Work: Making Letters in Early Modern England and Mary Sidney’s Urania,” in Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1680 (2021); “Waste,” in The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England (2021); and “Such Dispersive Scattredness: Early Modern Encounters with Binding Waste,” in Journal of the Northern Renaissance (2017).

Dr. Daniel Fountain

Daniel Fountain is an artist and Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Their research is often practice-led, engaging with waste materials to explore themes of marginality, queer identity, and camp. Daniel’s areas of interest in waste studies broadly include queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to the study of waste and waste aesthetics. They have book chapters forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality (2022) and Queer Trash and Feminist Excretions: New Directions in Literary Waste Studies (2022). Their scholarship, reviews, and artwork have also appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Burlington Contemporary, Art History, Surface Design Association, and more. Follow them on Twitter @Daniel_Fountain.

Dr. Heidi Craig

Dr. Heidi Craig is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography and co-editor of Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts. Her research and teaching focuses on early modern literature and culture, book history and digital humanities. Her current research addresses the significance of rags and rag collectors in the early paper industry, arguing for the centrality of these undervalued objects and individuals to early textual culture. Her present focus is early modern England, but she intends to pursue a transnational and transhistorical investigation of the practice of rag collection. Craig has published pieces on rags and rag pickers in Literary Compass and in Valerie Wayne’s recent edited collection, Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England. She is presently completing her first book manuscript, on the reception and production of early modern drama during the English theatrical prohibition of 1642 to 1660. 

Dr. Arthur Rose

Arthur Rose is Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcom Centre Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. His current project looks at literary, medical and legal accounts of asbestos from the major asbestos producing nations, and what it might mean to “live with” asbestos. As asbestos itself is increasingly consigned to literal waste dumps and, more figuratively, to the ash heap of history, this project considers the remains of asbestos and its continuing legacy. Recent publications include “Mining Memories with Donald Trump in the Anthropocene” (Modern Fiction Studies), the co-edited collection, Reading Breath in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), and “Disrupted breath, songlines of breathlessness: an interdisciplinary response” (forthcoming, 2020). He was previously Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in English at the University of Bristol. He tweets @eclecticpneumas

Dr. Jerrine Tan

Jerrine Tan is a Visiting Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literature in the English department at Mount Holyoke College. Her current research focuses on feminist theory and the non-human, dystopian landscapes and corporate dystopias. She is interested in the representation of waste and toxicity alongside industrialization and growth and the effects of toxicity on bodies as well as the legibility of those effects across ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities. Her other research interests include Global Anglophone Literature, 20th American Literature, World Literature, Film Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. From 2016-2017, she served as Assistant Editor of the feminist journal differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Duke University Press. She received her BA in English and Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in English and PhD from Brown University. She has received fellowships from the Brown University Graduate School, the Japan Foundation, and Fudan University, among other institutions.

Dr. Layla Hendow

Layla Hendow is a researcher at the University of Hull. She wrote her PhD thesis on value and the creation of “positive waste” in contemporary North American waste novels. Previously, she completed her MA at Warwick University with a focus on waste and petro-fiction, and her BA at Lancaster University. Her interests include waste and garbage studies, cli-fi, ecocriticism, and thing theory in contemporary British and North American literature. She has a particular interest in the work of Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Karen Tei Yamashita and Margaret Atwood. Her recent publications include “Cormac McCarthy’s Eco-men: the loss of the natural world in the twentieth century American Landscape,” in Ecomasculinities: Negotiating Male Gender Identity in U.S. Fiction (Lexington Books, 2019), and “Oil and Women: Invisibility as Power in Nawal El-Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom of Oil,” in The Seen and Unseen: The Visual Culture of Imperialism (Brill Publishing, 2017).

Dr. Karina Jakubowicz

Karina Jakubowicz lectures on literary modernism, twentieth century literature, and film. She is an adjunct lecturer at Florida State University, Fordham University, and James Madison University, and works at their London campuses. She is currently writing a book on gardens in the work of Virginia Woolf. She is particularly interested in the representation of waste in literary modernism, and in the theme of recycling in and around Woolf’s writing.  Karina’s doctorate thesis was on the significance of gardens in the work of Virginia Woolf, and she is particularly interested in how garden design and horticulture  influenced literary modernism. She has  published a short book titled Garsington Manor and the Bloomsbury Group (London: Cecil Woolf, 2016)  which concerns the country estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell, and demonstrates the impact that it had on writers such as Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield.

Dr. Netta Bar Yosef Paz

Netta Bar Yosef-Paz is the director of the Center for Contemplative Pedagogy at the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology, and the Arts, where she also teaches Literature. Her fields of research and teaching include an ecocritical approach to contemporary American and Hebrew fiction, whiteness studies, representations of filth in art and literature, and contemplative pedagogy. Recent publications include “Hebrew Dystopias: From National Catastrophes to Ecological Disasters” (Israel Studies Review 2018), and “Filthy ‘Others’ in 1990s Environmentalist Fiction: From Steinbeck to Boyle” (Steinbeck Review 2017).

Isabel Lane

Isabel Lane’s PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures will be granted by Yale in December 2019, and her research lies at the intersection of the environmental humanities, narrative theory, and comparative literature. Her current book-length project, Narrative Fallout: The Russian and American Novel After the Bomb, extends her engagement with environmental and social issues; she theorizes the formal effects of nuclear technologies on contemporary post-Soviet and North American prose, asking how our conceptualization of temporally and physically distant populations challenges representation and ethical action. A piece of this project, titled “Byproduct Temporalities: Nuclear Waste in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard,” is forthcoming in a special issue of Russian Literature on the Anthropocene in Russian culture. Isabel is currently the Program Director for the Boston College Prison Education Program, part of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, and is working to establish a BC bachelor’s degree at a Massachusetts correctional facility and teach college-level literature courses on site. One of her goals at both the prison and traditional campus has been to challenge where learning can take place. At Yale, she co-taught a course called Ecology and Russian Culture, which included experiential activities like tree identification, farm work, and museum visits, and she has brought that same commitment to student engagement, interdisciplinarity, and environmental and social justice to the prison setting. 

Sonakshi Srivastava

Sonakshi Srivastava graduated from the University of Delhi, in 2020, and is now an MPhil scholar at Indraprastha University where she researches on speculative fiction(s), food futures, and waste(s). Currently, she is also an Oceanvale Scholar for the Spring-Autumn session at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, where she is researching on the aesthetics of emotions in Kobo Abe’s novels. Her areas of interest include Literature in the Anthropocene, discard studies, food studies, and memory and trauma studies. Her work on the ethics of vegetarianism was previously published in the 2020 summer issue of the University of Glasgow’s journal, eSharp.

Marc Ricard

Marc Ricard is a PhD Candidate in the department of English at the University of Exeter (UK). His current research project, Fantastical Flora: Vegetal Imaginaries in Late Victorian Literature, examines how plant life was used as a speculative tool for writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to reimagine their world as a green u/dis-topia, where new varieties of vegetation could revolutionise industrial, social or artistic forms. A recurrent theme throughout this project has been the transferral of waste into utile resources through the life processes of plants, leading to an interest in waste scholarship. Research interests include: the intersection of waste with vegetable environments in contemporary or historic sources, waste & queer theory, as well as the visibilities & vocabularies of waste in popular online discourse.

Clint Wilson III

Clint Wilson III is a doctoral candidate in English at Rice University in Houston, TX, where he also serves as a fellow for the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS). He was a 2018–19 Andrew W. Mellon fellow with the seminar series, “Waste: Histories and Futures,” where he researched waste’s relationship to temporal structures themselves transformed by modern understandings of waste “management” and transport. His dissertation, Toxic Media: The Modernist Poetics of Poison and Pollution, explores the forms of mediation that both distribute and supposedly intercept vectors of toxic contamination within twentieth-century literary imaginaries. He has written on breath, infrastructure, and waste as examples of these “toxic media.” His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Environmental Philosophy.