Steering Committee

Stephanie LeMenager is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her publications include the books Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014), Manifest and Other Destinies (2005), and Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (2011). Her co-edited collection Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities addresses climate change pedagogy and her forthcoming Bloomsbury four-volume collection, Literature and Environment, offers a history of the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities through the one hundred most influential published articles in the field. LeMenager is a founding editor and current advisory board member of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, the first Environmental Humanities journal to be based in the United States. She is a recent recipient of the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship for Advanced Study, where she began writing her latest book, about climate change, fiction, and lies. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Time magazine, Climate Wire, and on CBC radio and NPR.

Marsha Weisiger is the Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History and an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. Her scholarship focuses primarily on the environmental history of the American West. She is the author of Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (University of Washington Press, 2009) which won four awards, including the Norris and Carol Hundley Award and the Hal Rothman Book Award, and Land of Plenty: Oklahomans in the Cotton Fields of Arizona, 1933-1942 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), which won the Angie Debo Prize. She has also written on wolf reintroduction, gendering environmental history, environmental justice, and architectural history. Her work has received two faculty research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a King Fellowship from the Clements Center for Southwest Studies. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and co-founder and co-coordinator of the Cascadia Environmental History Collaborative.

Adell Amos is the Clayton R. Hess Professor of Law and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the UO School of Law. Her research focuses on the relationship between federal and state governments on water resource management, the role of administrative agencies in setting national, state, and local water policy, the role of law in developing water policy and responding to change, and the impact of stakeholder participation in water resource decision-making. In 2008, Amos began a two-year appointment with the Obama Administration in Washington DC as the Deputy Solicitor for Land and Water Resources at the U.S. Department of the Interior. In this role, Amos oversaw legal and policy issues involving the nation’s water resources and public lands, providing policy counsel directly to the Secretary of Interior and Deputy Secretary as well as the offices for the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, the Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In particular, she worked directly on water resilience and planning, wilderness policy, the National Landscape Conservation System, renewable energy and its associated water footprint, low-impact hydropower, dam removal efforts including the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative, and many others. Amos first joined the UO faculty in 2005 after practicing environmental and natural resources law with the U.S. Department of Interior in Washington DC. Prior to that, she clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for The Honorable Procter Hug, Jr. (then Chief Judge). Her most recent scholarship focuses on the integration of law and policy into hydrologic and socioeconomic modeling for the Willamette River Basin as well as the legal framework that provides the backdrop for water conflicts and dispute resolution through a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary effort funded by the NOAA and the National Science Foundation. She has published broadly in the field of water law including, most recently Water Law in a Nutshell, 5^th ed. (2015), co-authored with David Getches and Sandi Zellmer.

Mark Carey is Professor of History and Environmental Studies in the Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon. His work links environmental history and the history of science through studies of climate change, glacier-society interactions, water resource management, natural disasters, and mountaineering—particularly in the Andes and Polar Regions. He co-edited The High-Mountain Cryosphere: Environmental Changes and Human Risks (Cambridge, 2015). His other books are: Glaciares, cambio climático y desastres naturales: Ciencia y sociedad en el Perú (IFEA/IEP, 2014); and In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (Oxford, 2010), which won the Elinor Melville Award for the best book on Latin American environmental history. He has also published nearly 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and has received four National Science Foundation grants over the last decade. He runs the Glacier Lab for the Study of Ice and Society at the University of Oregon.

Kate Mondloch is the Interim Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Oregon. She is also Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the founding director of the University’s graduate certificate program in New Media and Culture. Her research interests focus on late 20th- and early 21st- century art, theory, and criticism, particularly as these areas of inquiry intersect with the cultural, social, and aesthetic possibilities of new technologies. Professor Mondloch’s research fields include media art and theory, installation art, feminism, new media, science and technology studies, and the digital humanities. She is especially interested in theories of spectatorship and subjectivity, and in research methods that bridge the sciences and the humanities.

Nicolae Morar is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Dr. Morar’s research interests lie at the intersection of biology, ecology, and bioethics (especially biomedical, genethics, environmental, and research ethics). His work provides an inquiry into how various conceptual analyses in philosophy of biology and ecology influence and transform debates in bioethics, and in ethics broadly construed. As a Co-PI on the grant “Biodiversity at Twenty-Five: The Problem of Ecological Proxy Values”, his collaborative research has provided a critical assessment of the normative role of biodiversity in environmental ethics debates. Dr. Morar has several on-going projects concerning the role of biology and genetics in applied ethics, as well as the role emotions (especially, disgust) play in normative debates in our society. He is particularly interested in how new microbiological conceptions of human organisms and current biotechnologies are altering traditional conceptions of human nature.

Scott L. Pratt is Professor of Philosophy and Vice Provost and Executive Vice Provosts for Academic Affairs. His research and teaching interests are in American philosophy (including pragmatism, America feminism, philosophies of race, and Native American philosophy), philosophy of education, and the history of logic. He is coauthor of American Philosophy from Wounded Knee the Present (Bloomsbury, 2015), a comprehensive history of philosophy in North America from 1890 to the present, and author of two books including Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2002) on the influence of Native American thought on European American philosophy. He is co-editor of four volumes including American Philosophies: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2002). He has published articles on the philosophy of pluralism, Dewey’s theory of inquiry, the philosophy of education, Josiah Royce’s logic, and on the intersection of American philosophy and the philosophies of indigenous North American peoples.

Laura Pulido is a Professor in the departments of Ethnic Studies and Geography where she studies and teaches environmental justice, critical ethnic studies, radical tourism, and landscapes of cultural memory. She is the author of numerous books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona 1996); Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California 2006), and A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng (University of California 2012). Within environmental justice she has focused on three specific, but related topics. First, her early work centered on how working-class communities of color defined and mobilized around environmental issues. She subsequently explored the various ways that racism functions within urban landscapes to create environmental inequality, and most recently, she has investigated environmental regulatory failure as a function of racial capitalism.

Gordon Sayre specializes in colonial and early American studies in French and English, indigenous American literature, autobiography and translation. He also teaches courses in car cultures and automobility. He is participating faculty in Environmental Studies and Folklore. Sayre is author, editor, or translator of five books, including the award-winning translation, The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715-1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic, by Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (2012), and The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh (2005).

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and former park ranger focused on contemporary art and design practices that engage pressing (political) ecological issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. Currently a joint professor in the History of Art and Architecture & Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, she was formerly a visiting professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and postdoc at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich; she holds a PhD in contemporary (post-1945) art history from UCLA. Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Art Journal Open, American Art, Third Text, The Avery Review, Field, and Cultural Geographies as well as multiple edited volumes and online journals; her first book, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, coedited with Kirsten Swenson, was published by the University of California Press in 2015. At present, she is developing a monograph, Uneven Geology: Notes from the Field of Contemporary Art; a coedited volume on art, visual culture, and climate change; and teaching courses on land art, Anthropocene debates, and “unnatural disasters.” She is also a core participant in two long-term, collaborative art projects: the Los Angeles Urban Rangers (2004-) and World of Matter (2011-). Her work has been supported by major grants/awards from Creative Capital, the College Art Association, Graham Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Luce Foundation, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Annenberg Foundation, and Switzer Foundation.

Sarah D. Wald is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and English at University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the intersections of environmental studies and ethnic studies in 20th and 21st century U.S. literature and culture with a particular interest in Latinx and Asian American literature and culture. She is the author of The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dustbowl (University of Washington Press, 2016) and co-editor of Latinx Literary Environmentalisms: Justice, Place, and the Decolonial (under contract with Temple UP). She is currently working on a monograph on diversity initiatives among public land advocates. She has published in Diálogo, Western American Literature, and Food, Culture, and Society as well as in several edited collections including Asian American Literature and the Environment, American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship, and Service Learning and Literary Studies in English. She is committed to community-engaged teaching and publicly-engaged scholarship, working closely with community organizations in teaching and public programming.

Richard York is Director and Professor of Environmental Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He does both theoretical and empirical work in the areas of environmental sociology, ecological economics, animal studies, and the sociology of science. He is Chair-Elect of the Section on Animals and Society of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and was the 2013-14 Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Chair of the Environment and Technology Section (ETS) of the ASA in 2013-14, and the Co-Editor of the journal Organization & Environment from 2006 to 2012. He has published three books and over 60 peer-reviewed articles. He has received the Fredrick H. Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award (2017) for lifetime achievement, the Teaching and Mentorship Award (2011), and the Outstanding Publication Award twice (2004 and 2007) from the ETS of the ASA; the Gerald L. Young Book Award in Human Ecology from the Society for Human Ecology; the Rural Sociology Best Paper Award (2011) from the Rural Sociological Society; the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Section on Animals & Society of the ASA (2015); and the Honorable Mention for the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting from the Theory Section of the ASA.