A complete list of ICC events (2015–25) is available here
Featured guest speakers at ICC events have included internationally-renowned activists, authors, filmmakers, scientists, and scholars. UF faculty and researchers from across the arts, humanities, and sciences have participated as respondents and moderators.
(Biographies are current to the most recent event in which that speaker participated)
Abraham Acosta is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona. He specializes in literary and cultural analysis, focusing on questions of subalternity, postcoloniality, biopolitics, and posthegemonic in the Americas. His research traverses the critical realities of contemporary multilingual contexts, where assumptions of power, knowledge, and capital crosshatch with historical translations of cultural difference. Acosta’s work has been published in such journals as Dispositio/n, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Social Text, and Critical Multilingualism Studies. His book, Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance (2014) is published by Fordham University Press. (See “Decolonizing Knowledge”)
Jamie Allen is Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab, Basel, and Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media and Communications at NSCAD, in Halifax, Canada. He has been an electronics engineer, a polymer chemist and a designer with the American Museum of Natural History. Allen works at the intersection of art, design, ecology, science, technology and is occupied with the creation of prefigurative institutions that are generous and collaborative, acknowledging that friendship, passion, and love are central to knowledge practices like art and research. (See “This Cycle, Here, This One”)
Madhur Anand is the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015), and This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020), winner of the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, among Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. Her poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in such journals as The Puritan, Brick, Longreads.com, The New Quarterly, The Walrus, and This. She has published critical and scholarly work in ecopoetics and as a literary reviewer in The Literary Review of Canada, With Adam Dickinson she is co-editor of Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (2009). She is the co-author of the textbook Climate Change Biology (2011), and over 120 scientific publications in the fields of human-ecological modeling, complex systems, conservation ecology, and sustainability science. She is Professor of Ecology and Sustainability at The University of Guelph, where she is the Inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research. (See “Poetry & Science in An Age of Unraveling’)
Simone Athayde is Associate Professor in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies and a faculty member of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Florida International University. She is an environmental anthropologist and interdisciplinary ecologist who has worked across the Amazonian region for over 20 years, supporting Indigenous peoples and local communities’ self-determination and sustainable livelihoods, as well as biocultural and territorial rights. (See “Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Isaac Augspurg is a rising high school student at Trilogy School, Gainesville, FL. He lives on a 20 acre homestead outside of Gainesville where he and his family grow much of their food and raise dairy goats, chickens, pigs, and turkeys. He is a passionate advocate of gardening and sustainable agriculture and enjoys the region’s local springs and beaches. Isaac has been involved in environmental activism since the age of 10. (See “Our Children’s Trust“ and “Climate Crisis: An Intergenerational Discussion”)
Edward B. Barbier is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics, Colorado State University and a Senior Scholar in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. His primary expertise is natural resource and development economics, as well as the interface between economics and ecology. His recent work focuses on policies for greening the post-pandemic recovery. (See “Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Cynthia Barnett is an environmental journalist and Hearst Visiting Professional at the College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida. Author of Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (2015, nominated for the National Book Award and the 2016 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis (2011), and Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. (2008). (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Casey Boyle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas in Austin where he researches and teaches digital rhetoric, composition theory, and rhetorical history. He previously served in the same role at the University of Utah from 2011-2014 in the University Writing Program and Department of English. He earned a BA at the University of Texas, an MA at the University of North Texas, and a PhD in the Rhetoric/Composition program at the University of South Carolina. His work has appeared (or will soon appear) in Kairos, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Computers and Composition, Technical Communication Quarterly, College English as well as essay collections Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. He is a managing editor of enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture as well as co-editor (with Scot Barnett) for the essay collection Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. Right now, Casey is completing his first book, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, that explores the role of practice and ethics in digital rhetoric. (See “In Ecomedia Res + EcoTour”)
Ian Breheny, Exhibit Designer at the Florida Museum, grew up during the golden age of late-night sf movies shown on local TV broadcasts, and has never fully recovered. He enjoys exploring the parallels between science education in museum settings and speculative fiction, which overlap on the common ground of science and storytelling. (See “Silent Running”)
Pablo Brescia is Professor of Spanish at the University of South Florida, where he teaches courses on contemporary Latin American literature. He is author of a book on Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (Borges: Cinco especulaciones, 2015), and another on the art of the short story (Modelos y prácticas en el cuento hispanoamericano: Juan José Arreola, Borges, Julio Cortázar, 2011). He has edited six critical anthologies on the McOndo and the Crack Generations, the Latin American short story, as well as collections on Borges and Sor Juana de la Cruz. He is a regular contributor to the journal Latin American Literature Today. In addition to publishing three of his own books of short fiction, he is the recipient of the 2013 Status of Latinos’ USF Faculty Award and the 2010 Jamie Bishop Memorial Award awarded by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. (See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press.. (See “Boys & Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land”)
J. Andrew Brown currently serves as Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature. He is author of Cyborgs in Latin America (2010) and Test Tube Envy (2005), and co-editor of Latin American Science Fiction (2012). As an expert on the interrelationships of science, technology and culture in contemporary Latin America, he has published over thirty articles on these topics, and his current project, Weirding Latin America, examines the ways that contemporary Latin American writers of the Southern Cone grapple with the continually evolving “weird” realities in their countries, including issues of neoliberalism, race, ecological disaster and the remnants of dictatorship. (See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Tobias Buckell. Born in the Caribbean, Buckell is a New York Times bestselling science fiction author and futurist. His novels and over 50 short stories have been translated into 17 languages and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Prometheus Awards, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His Arctic Rising series (now in its third installment) fuses science fiction with espionage thriller, centering on the international jockeying for access to the mineral wealth of the warming Arctic seas and the devastating effects of climate change on island nations. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Guy M. Burns is Managing Partner of Johnson Pope Bokor Ruppel and Burns, LLP. He has over 40 years of trial experience with over 100 trials in State and Federal Courts, as well as dozens of trials conducted before arbitration panels. He has represented plaintiffs on a pro bono basis in numerous public interest cases in both State and Federal Courts, arising out of discrimination based upon race, gender and sexual orientation, and in litigating constitutional claims relating to education and public housing. He is the lead attorney in a lawsuit brought by youth plaintiffs against the State of Florida, seeking changes to state environmental policies to address effects of climate change. (See “Our Children’s Trust“)
Marisol de la Cadena is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Her work includes the study of politics (including ontological politics), multispecies, indigeneity, history and the ahistorical world, world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. De la Cadena is interested in the perspectives and interface of science and the humanities, encompassing humans, animals, and “things.” She also focuses on life-and-death conditions of ecological and political change in a time of extreme droughts, floods, and war. Her books include Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (2015); Cultures of Race and Hybridity in Latin America (2011); Formaciones de indianidad: Articulaciones raciales, mestizaje, y nacion en America Latina (2008); and Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru (1910–1991) (2000). De la Cadena was a recipient of the John E. Sawyer Mellon-Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures (2012–16), and she received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Research Fellowship (2008). (See “The World to Come” and “Uncommoning Nature”)
Rachel Carrico is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies in the School of Theatre + Dance, University of Florida and an Affiliate Faculty member of UF’s Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research. Her research explores the aesthetic, political, and social histories of second lining, an improvisational dance form rooted in New Orleans’s African diaspora parading traditions. Her scholarship has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, TBS: The Black Scholar, and several edited volumes, including Freedom’s Dance: The Second Line in New Orleans (2017), The Oxford Handbook on Dance and Competition (2018), Contemporary Scholars and Artists Respond to the Baby Dolls of New Orleans (2018), and The Futures of Dance Studies (2019). (See “Artists as Second Responders”)
Christian Chelebourg is Professor of Literature at the Université de Lorraine and Director of the Centre d’Études Littéraires Jean Mourot. A specialist in the literary fantastic and contemporary popular literature, his many publications include Jules Verne, l’œil et ventre (1999), L’Imaginaire littéraire (2000), and Le Surnaturel – Poétique et écriture (2006). His 2012 book Les Écofictions: Mythologies de la fin du monde [Ecofictions: Mythologies of the World’s End] is the first major French-language study of climate fiction. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Houston Cypress, a member of the Otter Clan of the Miccosukee Tribe, is a two-spirit poet, artist, and environmentalist who creates portals between worlds. He combines art, conflict management, multimedia communications, gender diversity, and spirituality to fuel his work within the Love the Everglades Movement. The Movement fosters community participation and collaborative global action to protect and revitalize the sacred lands of the Everglades. (See “Climate Crisis: An Intergenerational Discussion” and “Scintillating Sovereignties”)
David Dalton is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte where he teaches Spanish and Latin American literature. He is author of Mestizo Modernity, Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico (2018). He has co-edited two volumes: Healthcare in Latin America (forthcoming, 2022) with Douglas Weatherford and The Transatlantic Undead for the journal Alambique (2018) with Sara Anne Potter. He has published over 20 peer reviewed articles in the Latin Americanist, Latin American Culture Studies, Revista de estudios hispánicos, Latin American Theatre Review, among others. He is currrently the editor of the journal Olmeca and is working on a new book on the transnational flow of bodies, capital and technologies, tentatively titled Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance.(See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Jack E. Davis is Professor of History and affiliated faculty member of the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Florida. Co-editor of Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida (2003) and Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida (2005). Author of Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930 (2001), An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (2009, and The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (2017). (See “Mr. Eternity”)
Shannon Lee Dawdy is Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods. The central thread running through her work concerns how landscapes and material objects mediate human relationships, with a regional focus on the U.S., Cuba, and Mexico. Her enduring interests include historical anthropology, archaeology of the contemporary, temporality, and capitalism’s intimate effects. She is the author of Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (2008) and Patina: A Profane Archaeology (2016). Her current research projects focus on the materiality of American funeral practices and archaeology of the future. (See “The Politics of Disaster Debris”)
T. J . Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and founder and director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award – and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013). Demos cocurated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015, and organized Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014. (See “The World to Come”)
Andrea Dutton. Associate Professor of Geology, University of Florida. A geochemist, sedimentologist, paleoclimatologist, and paleoceanographer, Dutton is a co-leader of PALSEA2, an international working group investigating the geological record of changes in sea levels and ice sheet mass, in order to better predict future sea level rise. Dutton’s research currently focuses on sea level reconstruction over glacial-interglacial timescales, with an emphasis on establishing the behavior of sea level and ice sheets during interglacial periods. (See Fall 2015 ICC Colloquium and “Our Children’s Trust“)
Schuyler Esprit is a scholar of Caribbean literature and cultural studies. She is Dean of Academic Affairs at Dominica State College as well as Founder and Director of Dominica State’s Create Caribbean Research Institute. She has pioneered Digital Humanities projects and digital technology training at the K-12 and College level in Dominica as well as collaboratively, linking classes at the Dominica State College and classes at colleges in the United States. She is now completing a book manuscript and its digital companion, both entitled Occasions for Caribbean Reading, an historical exploration of reading culture in the Caribbean. (See “Ecologies and Institutions”)
Jeanne Ewert is Associate University Librarian for English and American Literature, Film, and Folklore, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. She holds an AM and a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Her interest in the Galveston Hurricane arose out of genealogical research into her Dutch Mennonite ancestors, who lived briefly in Texas, and who trace their sojourn in search of religious freedom to 16th century Holland. (See “Climate Catastrophe & the Vulnerability of Memory”)
Jay Famiglietti is Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, and the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. He and his team have been researching and communicating about water and climate change – in academics, in business, in government and to the general public – for over 25 years. He has appeared as a featured expert in the water documentary Last Call at the Oasis, on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, and on Real Time with Bill Maher. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Robert J. Ferl is Distinguished Professor of Horticultural Sciences and Assistant Vice President for Research. His work in space biology focuses on transcriptomics (the study of RNA synthesis), epigenomics (the study of epigenetic modifications of a cell’s genetic material), and proteomics (the large-scale study of proteins). Former Chair of the Science Council, Division of Space Life Sciences, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), Ferl is the winner of numerous awards for his space-related research, including NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (2016) and Exceptional Public Service Medal (2022). (See “Silent Running”)
Esther Figueroa, PhD, is a Jamaican independent filmmaker, writer, educator and linguist with over thirty five years of media productions including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her activist filmmaking gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films are screened and televised all over the world and taught at numerous universities. They include Jamaica for Sale (2009), the award-winning feature documentary about tourism and unsustainable development. Her latest feature documentary Fly Me To The Moon (2019) is about modernity and the global aluminum industry. She recently created and co-hosted GEFF 2020, the first online film festival focused on global extraction. Her environmental novel Limbo (2013), was a finalist in the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards for Multi-cultural Fiction. (See “Fly Me to the Moon”)
W. Kent Fuchs became the 12th President of the University of Florida in January 2015. He came to UF from Cornell University, where he served most recently as Provost, and previously as Dean of the Cornell College of Engineering. Before that, he was the head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University and a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. President Fuchs is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
M. Elizabeth Ginway is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Florida. She is the author of Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future (2004), a collection of essays Visão Alienígena [Alien Vision] (2010), and co-editor of Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice (2012) with J. Andrew Brown. She is currently working on a book-length study of Mexican and Brazilian science fiction. She is co-founder of UF’s Science Fiction Working Group. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Macarena Gómez-Barris is founder and Director of the Global South Center, a transdisciplinary space for experimental research, artistic, and activist praxis, and Chairperson of the Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She publishes on decolonial praxis, space and memory, and submerged perspectives. She is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press 2010), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press 2017), and Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (UC Press 2018). She is co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards A Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press 2010) and co-editor with Licia Fiol-Matta of Las Américas Quarterly, a special issue of American Quarterly (Fall 2014). Her new book project is At the Sea’s Edge. Her essays have appeared in Antipode, Social Text, GLQ, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies as well as numerous other venues and art catalogues. She has been a Visiting Professor at New York University and a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at FLACSO-Quito. (See “Decolonizing Knowledge”)
Susanne Götze (PhD, Universität Potsdam/Université Lorraine) is a freelance journalist and author of Land Unter im Paradies. Reportagen aus dem Menschenzeitalter (Underwater in Paradise. Reports from the Anthropocene, 2018). Her reporting has taken her around the world and engaged a wide range of human experiences and struggles with the effects of climate change. (See “Walls in the Head”)
Rachel Grant is Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses in strategic communication, social media management and media law. Her research looks at media studies of race, gender and class and she has conducted extensive research with social movements, social justice, and Black feminism. (See “Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Terry Harpold is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida and the founder and Director of Imagining Climate Change.
Emily Hind is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Florida. She has published three books: one about 20th– and 21st-century Mexican women intellectuals and two books of interviews, and she completed a Fulbright award to teach and study with the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalalpa, Mexico in June 2015. Hind won the 2005 Feministas Unidas Essay Prize with an article on Rosario Castellanos, published in Letras Femeninas. She has written numerous articles on Mexican literature and film, with concentrations on topics such as disability studies, children’s literature, pirates and celebrity culture, and the genre of the essay. Her current articles contemplate the theory of drugs and the shift toward the value of personality and extroversion. She is writing a book titled Dude Lit. (See “Daring or Collusion?”)
Helen Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey. She is the author of a monograph Green Documentary (2014) responding to the flood of new documentaries on environmental topics that came out in the first decade of the new millennium. She is now writing a second book, Radioactive Documentary, exploring current documentaries on the future of nuclear energy. An archival project looking at the history of UK and German nuclear power stations on film has been awarded funding by the British Academy. She has also published a number of journal articles and chapters on West German cinema, experimental film, Kafka adaptations, GDR and new Austrian cinema. She co-edited Deutschland im Spiegel seiner Filme (2000) and translated Alexander Kluge’s Cinema Stories (2007) with Martin Brady. Another book, Documentary and Disability (2017), co-edited with Catalin Brylla, has just been published. (See “The Contexts of Climate Change”)
Sarah Jornsay-Silverberg is Good Grief Network’s Emergent Strategist. She holds a JD in environmental and natural resources law from the Lewis & Clark Law School. She has traveled to southern Mongolia to help protect nomadic herding rights from destructive mining projects, and attended two UN Climate Change Negotiations, in Durban and Paris, to support small Pacific island nations in their efforts to create a just and equitable international climate change treaty. (See “Feeling & Healing Through the Anthropocene”)
Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan filmmaker, screenwriter, and activist. Her films include Reflection (2005), Ama’s Mama (2005), The Spark That Unites (2006), Ras Star (2007), From a Whisper (2008), For Our Land (2009), and Pumzi (2009). (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Elin Kelsey is an activist, scholar, and educator in the area of evidence-based hope. Her work focuses on the reciprocal relationship between humans and the rest of nature, particularly in relation to the emotional implications of the narrative of environmental doom and gloom on children and adults. (See “Hope Matters”)
Oonya Kempadoo is the author of Buxton Spice (1997), long-listed for the Orange Prize and translated into six languages; Tide Running (2001), winner of the Casa de Las Americas Prize (2002); and All Decent Animals (2013), #6 on Oprah Winfrey’s Summer Reads for 2013. She serves as advisor to the Caribbean literacy non-profit “Hands Across the Sea” and is co-founder of the Grenada Community Library & Resource Center in St George’s, Grenada. (See “Which Medium? Whose Story?”)
Dorothy Ko is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the Barnard College of Columbia University. As a historian of early modern China, her research interests have included Literature, Visual and Material culture; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Science and Technology; Eco-Art History. She is author of numerous books, including The Social Life Of Inkstones. Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China (2017). (See “Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Chief Afukaká Kuikuro is the Paramount Chief of the Kuikuro Indigenous Nation of the Mato Grosso region of the Brazilian Amazon. (See “Indigenous Peoples & Partnerships in the Brazilian Amazon”)
Born in French Polynesia, Temiti Lehartel is an environmental activist (350 Pacific) and PhD candidate in the Département d’Études anglophones, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3, France. Her research focuses primarily on the effects of climate change in Oceania, indigenous struggle in Australia, ethical international development, and the emerging literature of Pacific Island climate fiction, in particular the work of Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright (Plains of Promise, Carpentaria, The Swan Book, Tracker.) (See “An Impossible Dialectic”)
Aimee Lewis-Reau is Good Grief Network’s Co-founder and lead facilitator. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Georgia College & State University. (See “Feeling & Healing Through the Anthropocene”)
Jean-Marc Ligny. Author of more than forty science fiction novels, including Aqua™ (2006), about water wars in a near-future Africa, and winner of the Prix Bob-Morane, the Prix Rosny aîné, the Prix Julia-Verlanger, and the Prix Une autre Terre. His 2012 sequel, Exodes [Exodus], winner of the Prix Européens (Utopiales), envisages a future Europe subjected to the most extreme effects of climate change and the resulting political and social upheaval. The third novel in the series, Semences [Seeds], will be published this fall. (See Fall 2015 ICC Colloquium)
Bette Loiselle is Director of the Tropical Conservation and Development Program in the Center for Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Florida. The author of more than 100 peer-reviewed journal papers in the fields of tropical ecology, conservation biology, and biodiversity, her research focuses on biodiversity in tropical systems, in particular the role of animals as seed dispersers and the potential consequences of global climate change on the distribution of plants and animals. (See “Higher Education During the Great Disruption”)
Andrea Lucky is Assistant Research Scientist in the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of Florida. An entomologist and biodiversity scientist with a focus on the evolution of ants. She is specifically interested in understanding how diversification and dispersal have led to distribution patterns we see today. As a founding director of the School of Ants citizen science project, a major goal of her work is to make science accessible and available to the general public, particularly to make the process of “doing” science accessible to non-scientists. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Emily Maguire is Associate Professor of Spanish at Northwestern University where she specializes in modern Latin American literature and culture, with a focus on the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas. She is author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011, 2nd ed. 2018) which discusses the re-valorization of Afro-Cuban culture as the source of Cuban-ness. She is the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Discourse on Caribbean Aesthetics and Politics (2014), and is author of over 20 articles and chapters. Her current book project explores the uses of science fiction in recent Caribbean literature and film. Portions of this research project have been published including an article on José “Pepe” Liboy for the Revista Iberoamericana 2017) and a chapter on the film Juan of the Dead in Global Science Fiction Cinema (2015). (See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Pedro Neves Marques is a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. He has exhibited in art venues such as the Tate Modern, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York; V-A-C Foundation, Venice; Museu Colecçã Berardo, Lisbon; Contour Biennale 8, Mechelen, Belgium; PAV, Turin; Sursock Art Museum, Beirut; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; e-flux, New York; Casa do Povo, São Paulo, Brazil; 12th Cuenca Biennial, Cuenca, Ecuador; Sculpture Center, New York; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; EDP Foundation, Lisbon; Serralves Museum for Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal; as well as in art galleries such as Galleria Umberto di Marino, Naples, Pedro Cera, Lisbon; and Gallerie Martin Janda, Vienna. His first short-fiction film, Semente Exterminadora [Exterminator Seed], premiered at the IndieLisboa Film Festival in 2017. His short-film essay Where to Sit at the Dinner Table? premiered at DocLisboa International Film Festival in 2013. With fellow artist Mariana Silva he runs http://www.inhabitants-tv.org/, an online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting. (See “The World to Come”)
Anita M.S. Marshall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida, and the Executive Director of the International Association for Geoscience Diversity (theIAGD.org), a non-profit with the mission to improve inclusion in the geoscience for people with disabilities. Her primary research areas are geoscience education, centered on the experiences of people with disabilities and other underserved groups in science disciplines, experiential learning (especially in field settings), and the culture of the geosciences. (See “The Rocks Don’t Care How You Get There”)
Ellen E. Martin is a Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida, and Co-Director of the Florida Climate Institute. Her research on paleoceanography and paleoclimatology uses the geochemistry of deep sea sediment to reconstruct past climate conditions and understand climate sensitivity. She is particularly interested in the relationship between ocean circulation patterns and climate, as well as the glacial history of Greenland. She is a University of Florida Term Professor and a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium and “The World to Come”)
Franz Mauelshagen is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Board of Directors at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, where he coordinates the “Climate & Culture” research program. Since 2000 he has held postdoctoral research positions at the Universities of Bielefeld (2000–2003) and Zurich (2003–2008). He lectured at the Universities of Bielefeld, Zurich, Berne and St. Gallen. He is a co-founder of the International Society for Historical Climatology and Climate History. (See “The Past & Futures of the Anthropocene”)
Bénédicte Meillon is Associate Professor of English Studies at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France. A member of the Advisory Board for EASCLE (European Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment), she is the founder of the Écopoétique Perpignan Internet platform and co-founder of the OIKOS research group and network dedicated to contemporary global ecopoetics and ecocriticism, which encourages transdisciplinary approaches across the environmental arts, sciences, and humanities. (See “Ecopoetics of Reenchantment”)
Anne McConnell is a Professor in the English Department at West Virginia State University. She specializes in contemporary literature and philosophy from France, Latin America, and the United States, with an emphasis in animal studies and ecocriticism. She has published two books, Approaching Disappearance (2013) and Stepping Off the Edge (2021), along with a variety of academic articles. Topics of recent research include literary and philosophical explorations of falconry and interspecies hunting practices; animal speech and interspecies communication; the ethical and ecological obligations of human-cat companionship; and interspecies knowledge practices. (See “Getting to Know You”)
Barbara Mennel is Associate Professor of English and German at the University of Florida and Interim Director of UF’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. She is author of The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature (2007), Cities and Cinema(2008), and Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys (2012). With Jaimey Fisher she edited the volume Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literature and Visual Culture(2010) and with Sabine Hake she edited the collection Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens ( 2012). She has published in Camera Obscura, Germanic Review, Modern Austrian Literature, New German Critique, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Women in German Yearbook, and TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking World. Dr. Mennel will take part in Monday night’s discussion of Hannes Lang’s Peak. (See “The Contexts of Climate Change”)
Committed to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, Gabriela Damián Miravete is an author, screenwriter, producer, and radio journalist. The translation of her 2018 story “They Will Dream in the Garden” won the 2018 James Tiptree Award for SF exploring and expanding concepts of gender. The story appears in The Silence of the Bodies: Stories about Femicides, edited by Sergio González Ramírez, and exemplifies the feminist themes that permeate Miravete’s writing. She currently teaches at Centro University in Mexico City, specializing in women’s writing and children’s literature, and for Under the Volcano, a guided writing residency for poets, fiction writers, journalists and essayists based in Tepotlán, Mexico. Along with artists and scientists, she founded the Cúmulo de Tesla Collection, which promotes the relationship between art, science, and science fiction. She has published stories in anthologies in Spanish and English, and among her latest projects is FutureCon, an online collective event that brought together science fiction authors and scholars from around the world in September 2021. (See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Stephen Mulkey is the former President (2011–15) of Unity College (Unity, Maine), where he led the College’s adoption of Sustainability Science as a framework for its liberal arts programming. From 2008 to 2011 he was Director of Environmental Science at the University of Idaho. From 1996 to 2008, he was a member of the faculty of the University of Florida Department of Botany and Director of Research and Outreach/Extension for the UF School of Natural Resources and Environment. In 1990 he co-founded in 1990 and later directed the International Center for Tropical Ecology at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. (See “Higher Education During the Great Disruption”)
Natasha Myers is an anthropologist of art, science, and ecology based at York University, where she directs the Plant Studies Collaboratory, convenes the Politics of Evidence Working Group, and coorganizes the Toronto Technoscience Salon. Her first book, Rendering Life Molecular (2015), is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. The book received the 2016 Robert K. Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. Her current projects span investigations of the arts and sciences of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics and aesthetics of garden enclosures in a time of climate change, and, most recently, she has launched a long-term ethnography experimenting with the arts of ecological attention in an ancient oak savannah in a large urban park in Toronto. “Becoming Sensor,” her research-collaboration with award-winning dancer and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona can be viewed at http://becomingsensor.com. Links to her various projects, publications, actions, and events can be found at http://natashamyers.org. (See “The World to Come”)
Christa Olson is Associate Professor and Director of English 201-Intermediate Composition, Department of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a rhetorical historian focusing on trans-American visual cultures. In her research, she returns repeatedly to the rhetorical sources and consequences of nationalism. She is the author of Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador and has published articles on visual culture, historiography, Américan rhetoric in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and Literacy in Composition Studies. Olson’s current research examines the visual history of U.S.–Latin American relations in order to understand how U.S. publics came to see themselves as particularly American among Americans. She is a regular contributor to Reading the Pictures, an online venue dedicated to public-facing analysis of photojournalism. (See “Decolonizing Knowledge”)
Pedro Ángel Palou is the author of thirty-three books, including an acclaimed novel Como quien se desangra, winner of the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 2003. He was honored with the Francisco Xavier Clavigero National Prize in History for his book on the sociology of culture in Mexico, 1900–1940, La casa del silencio, aproximación en tres tiempos a Contemporáneos. In 2009, he was a finalist of the Planeta Casa America competition for his novel El dinero del diablo, published in twenty-two countries of the Spanish-speaking world. He is currently a Professor of Latin American Studies and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University. Prior to moving to the United States, he served as Minister of Culture of the State of Puebla in Mexico and as President of the University of the Americas-Puebla. (See “Daring or Collusion?”)
Anna-Lisa Paul is the Director of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR), and a Research Professor in the Department of Horticultural Sciences. Paul has served the space research community as the President of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research, as a member of the ISS Standing Review Board, on NASA’s GeneLab Science Council, and on an advisory board for the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (SARG). In 2019 Paul received the NASA Medal of Honor for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and was inducted as a Fellow of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research. Her current research is focused on evaluating the epigenetic responses of Arabidopsis thaliana (the thale cress) to the spaceflight environment. (See “Silent Running”)
Edmundo Paz Soldán is a Bolivian author and professor of Latin American Literature at Cornell University where he currently serves as chair of Romance Languages. His award-winning works have garnered the Erich Guttentag Prize, the Juan Rulfo prize for short stories and Bolivia’s Premio Nacional de la Novela. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim award (2006). Among his most recent titles are Los días de la peste (The Days of the Plague, 2018), La mirada de las plantas (The Gaze of the Plants, 2019) Allá afuera hay monstruos (There are Monsters Out There, 2021). His new short story collection, La vía del futuro (Pages of the Future) will be published in late October of this year. In addition to his numerous academic publications and works of fiction, he is a cultural columnist for El país, The New York Times, and World Literature Today. (See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Anna L. Peterson is Professor of Religion at the University of Florida. Her research and teaching areas are social ethics, environmental ethics, religion and social change, animal studies, and religion and politics in Latin America. At UF, she is affiliated with several interdisciplinary programs: the Center for Latin American Studies, the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Program in Tropical Conservation and Development, and the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research. (See “Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Sarah Politz is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the University of Florida School of Music. Her research and teaching focus on creative practice in African and Afro-diasporic music, particularly in the context of popular music and new African diasporas in Europe and North America. Her publications have explored a wide range of topics, from phenomenology, semiotics, and history in music analysis, to culturally grounded definitions of musical genre and style, the aesthetics of jazz, and Afro-modernism. (See “Ethnomusicology & Relational Listening in the Music of Lionel Loueke of Benin”)
Erin Prophet is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, University of Florida. She is a scholar of religion with interests in alternative spirituality, medicine, and environmental ethics. She studies millennialism and apocalypticism in new religious movements as well as the influence of fiction on theology. Among her publications are Prophet’s Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside Church Universal and Triumphant (2009) and “Charisma and Authority in New Religious Movements,” in the Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements (2016). In addition to her PhD in Religion (Rice University), she has a Master’s degree in public health. She is a co-author with Jeffrey Kripal of the textbook Comparing Religions (2014). (See “Religion, Rhetoric & Climate Change”)
Jesse Popp is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Science at the University of Guelph. She is a member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory with Anishinaabe and mixed European heritage, and strives to promote inclusive science that embraces multiple ways of knowing while on her journey of learning and sharing. As the PI of the Wildlife, Indigenous Science, Ecology (WISE) Lab, she and her research team work to weave Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to contribute to the advancement of environmental and ecological science. (See “Weaving Ways of Knowing Among the Trees”)
Oscar Psychas is a sophomore Environmental Studies and Geography major at Middlebury College. Oscar is passionate about connecting youth with wild Florida and empowering them take leadership on environmental issues such as habitat loss and climate change that will affect young people’s future the most. In 2017 Oscar walked 280 miles from his family home in Gainesville to Tallahassee to bring attention to the need for more effective and lasting land conservation in the State of Florida. Oscar also leads “Young Leaders for Wild Florida,” an Alachua Conservation Trust summer program to empower teens to become Florida’s next generation of environmental leaders. (See “Our Children’s Trust“)
Yann Quero is a French journalist, science fiction novelist and anthologist. His novels Le Procès de l’Homme Blanc [The Trial of the White Man, 2005] and L’Avenir ne sera plus ce qu’il était [The Future is not What It Was, 2010] deal with a late twenty-first century Earth in crisis, as climate change has destroyed world political and economic orders and invited genocidal solutions. He is editor of the anthology Le Réchauffment climatique et après [Global Warming and After, 2014], the first collection of short fiction on climate change in French. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Sarah Jaquette Ray is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Humboldt State University, where she has been Program Leader of the Environmental Studies Program since 2013. Her first book, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (2013) explores the ways that environmental discourse often reinforces existing social hierarchies, drawing on a legacy of nativist, racial, and ableist exclusion in environmental history. Ray has edited three collections, including Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory (2017), Disability Studies & the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (2017), and Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (2019). Her second book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, was published in 2020. (See “How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet”)
Nathaniel Rich. Author of two novels, Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) and The Mayor’s Tongue (2008). He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and his essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New Orleans. Odds Against Tomorrow has been lauded as the first American climate fiction novel to break into the mainstream. (See Fall 2015 ICC Colloquium)
Simon Richter is Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures and member of the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature and Religious Studies, fellow of the Institute of Urban Research, and affiliated with the Programs in Cinema Studies, Environmental Humanities, Women’s Studies, and the Penn Water Center. His published books include Women, Pleasure, Film: What Lolas Want, Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy and the Body in the German Enlightenment and Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain. He is editor or co-editor of Unwrapping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge, The Literature of Weimar Classicism, and Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature. Richter has published articles in the areas of history of medicine, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, film studies, aesthetics, opera and literature, German foodways, cinema studies, cultural studies, environmental humanities, and Nazi-era and postwar literature. (See “Polder-Geist“)
As part of a new generation interested in the genre of horror in the tradition of Poe, Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero’s latest book Tierra fresca de su tumba (Fresh Dirt from the Grave) has sparked international interest in her work. Translated into Portuguese in 2021, this collection will soon be available in English translation from the Charco Press. Her 2015 collection of stories Para comerte mejor (All the Better to Eat You), inspired by her interest in traditional stories, comics and the fantastic, won the Dante Alighieri Award in Bolivia. She is author of four novels and award-winning short stories, and her 2015 novel, 98 Degrees Without Shade has been made into a film by director Juan Pablo Richter. As a professor, scholar, writing instructor and researcher, Rivero has been active online and is currently teaching for the Escuela de Letras el Billar in Spain. (See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Frances Roberts-Gregory is a vegan ecowomanist and future faculty fellow at Northeastern University. She is a co-founding member of the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal, former environmental educator for the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and resource developer for the New Orleans and C40 Women4Climate Mentorship Program. In 2021, she will start a new position as an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and co-director of the Spelman College Food Studies Program. Reach her via Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @BlackngreenPhD. (See “Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Andrea Rodgers is Senior Staff Attorney for Our Children’s Trust, a 501 (c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to elevating the voice of youth to secure the legal right to a stable climate and healthy atmosphere. She has served as an Honors Attorney for the U.S. Department of Transportation, In-House Legal Counsel for the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe, and Staff Attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center. Her environmental law practice focuses on reducing pollution from industrial agricultural operations, protecting and enhancing instream flows for people and fish, and fighting climate change on behalf of young people and future generations. (See “Our Children’s Trust“)
Colleen Rua is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Theatre + Dance, University of Florida, and an Affiliate Faculty member in the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Arts in Medicine, and the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship. Her recent book, Performance, Trauma, and Puerto Rico in Musical Theatre (2023), puts commercial theatre in conversation with community-engaged practice in Puerto Rico, and considers the Y no había luz theatre collective as “performers of care,” as they mobilize joy and belonging in response to natural disaster, trauma and healing. (See “Artists as Second Responders”)
Kenneth Sassaman is Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of Florida Archaeology, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida. In 2009 he launched the Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida to investigate the material realities and cultural interventions of climate change and sea-level rise over the past 5,000 years. More recently, his work in coastal archaeology has focused on Atsena Otie, the 19th-century ancestral town of the modern town of Cedar Key. In 1896 a hurricane destroyed two timber mills and many of the homes of this now-abandoned island town. (See “Climate Catastrophe & the Vulnerability of Memory”)
Jade S. Sasser is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her work explores the intersectional impacts of climate change on women’s bodies, health, rights, and reproductive justice. Her first book, On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change, was published in 2018 by NYU Press. Sasser is currently writing a book on the role of race in climate change-related emotions, mental health, and reproductive plans. She has a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from University of California, Berkeley; an MA in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley; and an MPH in Global Health from Boston University. (See “Can We Have Reproductive Justice in a Climate Crisis?”)
Brett Scheffers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida. His research focuses on how human disturbances such as habitat loss and climate change impact the ecology of a diversity of animals such as birds, frogs, lizards, ants, and butterflies, and spans tropical ecosystems in Central and South America, East Africa, and Australasia. His research has been published in academic journals such as Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution and his work has been covered by news outlets such as as The Economist, Huffington Post, and Bloomberg News. He is an advisory member of the Climate Change Specialist group under the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which provides guidelines for assessing species vulnerability to climate change. He is a Florida Climate Institute 2018 Faculty Fellow and served as an organizing committee member for “Species on the Move,” an international conference focused on the redistribution of species as a result of climate change. His outreach efforts include popular writing in online news outlets such as The Conversation, merging art with science to improve learning, and communicating climate and conservation science to public audiences. (See “The World to Come”)
Deborah Scheuer is Emeritus Associate Professor of Physiology and Functional Genomics at the University of Florida. A lifelong environmental activist, she is a trained Leader in The Climate Reality Project and Chair of Climate Reality’s Gainesville Chapter. (See “The Climate Crisis & Its Solutions”)
LaUra Schmidt is the Founding Director of Good Grief Network. She holds an MS in Environmental Humanities from University of Utah. A Climate Reality Leadership Corps member and mentor, she spent time in Americorps serving coastal Louisiana after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. (See “Feeling & Healing Through the Anthropocene”)
Michael Schuering is DAAD Scholar in the University of Florida’s Center for European Studies. He has worked at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. From 2006 to 2011 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published on the history of science and technology, environmental history, and the history of refugee scholars expelled from Nazi Germany. His most recent book is “Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat“. Die evangelischen Kirchen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die Konflikte um die Atomenergie (“Professing against the Atomic State.” The Protestant Churches in West Germany and the Conflicts Concerning Atomic Energy (2015). Dr. Schuering will take part in Tuesday night’s discussion of Volker Sattel’s Under Control. (See“The Contexts of Climate Change”)
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Florida. Her special interests include the history, philosophy and sociology of the life sciences and in the intersection of biology and history. She recently served as Kosciuszko Foundation Visiting Professor at the University of Warsaw, in Warsaw Poland, participating in a “nature and culture” working group. (See “The Past & Futures of the Anthropocene”)
Karolina Sobecka is an artist, designer and researcher examining social arrangements that exploit, resist or accommodate technological change. Sobecka’s work has been shown internationally, including at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The National Art Museum of China, MoMa Film, ZKM and Marfa Dialogues, and has received numerous awards, including from Creative Capital, NYFA and the Princess Grace Foundation. Sobecka has taught at SAIC, RISD, and NYU, and is currently a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Aesthetic Practice and Theory, HGK, Basel, Switzerland. (See “This Cycle, Here, This One”)
Alioune Sow is Associate Professor of French and African Studies at the University of Florida; Director of the France-Florida Research Institute. Author of Vestiges et vertiges: Récits d’enfance dans les littératures africaines (2011), his research interests are in Francophone African literature and film and postcolonial African cultural production. (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium and Fall 2015 ICC Colloquium)
Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Stamm is currently completing a monograph with the working title of Freeing the Material Unconscious: Surrealism and Posthumanist Environmental Thought, and has also published translations of Russian-French speculative fiction writer Antoine Volodine’s novels Mevlido’s Dreams (2024) and The Inner Harbour, forthcoming in fall 2025 from the University of Minnesota Press. (See “Bad (Eco) Feminist?”)
Nicole Starosielski’s research focuses on the global distribution of digital media, and the relationship between technology, society, and the aquatic environment. Her book, The Undersea Network, examines the cultural and environmental dimensions of transoceanic cable systems, beginning with the telegraph cables that formed the first global communications network and extending to the fiber-optic infrastructure that carries almost international Internet traffic. Starosielski has published essays on how Fiji’s video stores serve as a nexus of digital media access (Media Fields Journal), on Guam’s critical role in transpacific digital exchange (Amerasia), on the cultural imbrications of cable systems in Hawaii and California (Journal of Visual Culture), and photo essays on undersea cables (Octopus and Media-N). Before coming to NYU, she taught at Miami University of Ohio. She received her Ph.D. from UC-Santa Barbara. (See “In Ecomedia Res + EcoTour”)
Delia Steverson is Assistant Professor of English and affiliate professor with UF’s Centers for African American Studies and Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research. Her research and teaching focus on intersections of African American Literature and Critical Disability Studies. Author of a forthcoming biography of the celebrated African American author Delores Phillips, Steverson’s work has appeared in the CLA Journal, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, The South Carolina Review, The Journal of American Culture, and The Explicator. (See “Silent Running”)
Alfredo Suppia is Associate Professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo, Brazil, where he teaches Brazilian and World Cinema and Film Analysis, Script Writing and Film Adaptation in the Department of Multi-Media Studies. He is author of over 40 articles on film, including the Oxford Bibliography on Latin American Science Fiction Film and two books on science fiction and Brazilian Cinema. He has organized five speaker series on film and science fiction at UNICAMP and has edited several anthologies of essays on science fiction and film, including Cartografias da ficção científica mundial (Cartographies of World Science Fiction, 2015) and Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema (2016). His current book project, Brazilian Science Fiction Cinema, is the first in-depth critical history of Brazilian science fiction cinema to be published in English. (See “Latin America Writes Back 2.0”)
Bron Taylor is Professor of Religion, Nature and Environmental Ethics at The University of Florida, a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center (at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munchen). Taylor has taught at The University of California, Long Beach, The University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, The University of Florida, the University of Colorado, the University of Bergen (Norway), and he has given invited and keynote lectures in more than two dozen countries. (See Fall 2015 ICC Colloquium)
Les Thiele is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida and Director of UF’s undergraduate major in Sustainability Studies. His interdisciplinary research and teaching focuses on political thought, sustainability, emerging technologies, and the intersection of political philosophy and the natural sciences. His central concerns are the responsibilities of citizenship and the opportunities for leadership in a world of rapid technological, social, and ecological change. He has published nine books, including Sustainability (Polity 2016) and The Art and Craft of Political Theory (Routledge 2019). (See “The World to Come”, Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Aaron Thier is an American novelist and essayist, author of The Ghost Apple (2014) and Mr. Eternity (2016). Thier has written for the The New Republic and The Buenos Aires Review. He is a regular contributor to The Nation and a columnist for Lucky Peach. (See “Mr. Eternity”)
Since the 1980s, Margaret Ross Tolbert’s springs paintings have featured in exhibits and collections in the US, Europe, and Türkiye. In 2010 her book AQUIFERious received a gold and silver medal in the Florida Book Awards, and the accompanying AQUIFERious exhibit and film was shown in New Orleans, the University of Virginia, and in numerous museums and art centers in Florida through 2019. Tolbert was a producer of Lost Springs (2017), a plea for restoration of a historic river and springs, with a premiere exhibition at the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art. Her public art installations include Orlando Springs (2011), at the Orlando International Airport, and Connected Worlds of Forest and Springs, at the Austin Cary Memorial Forest (2015). Tolbert has had several exhibits in the Art and Embassies program in Türkiye, and her commissioned 18 ft diptych Ulupinar/Great Spring was recently installed in the new United States embassy in Ankara. She is based in Gainesville, FL. (See “Proje SU: The Soul of Water”)
Helmuth Trischler is the head of research at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, a professor of modern history and the history of technology at LMU Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität), and the director (jointly with Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch) of the Rachel Carson Center. He is the author of twenty-eight books and edited volumes, some 130 articles, and the coeditor of a number of book series, including Umwelt und Geschichte (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) and The Environment in History: International Perspectives (Berghahn Books), and Routledge Environmental Humanities (Routledge). (See “The Past & Futures of the Anthropocene”)
Eloy Urroz is the author of eight novels, four books of literary criticism, four books of poetry, and dozens of essays. He is one of the founding members of the Crack movement, along with Volpi, Palou, the deceased Ignacio Padilla, and Ricard Chávez Castañeda. Currently, he is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at The Citadel in South Carolina. (See “Daring or Collusion?”)
Jeff VanderMeer is a speculative fiction writer with an interest in weird biology and the environment. In addition to his best-selling post-human Southern Reach Trilogy, he is the author of several novels tackling ecological and postcolonial issues. Nonfiction regularly appears in the Guardian, Atlantic.com, Washington Post, and New York Times. Winner of the Nebula Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award (4 times). He is currently working on a book-length study of science fiction’s response to “the slow apocalypse.” (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Blanche Verlie is an Australian climate change educator and researcher currently living on unceded Gadigal Country. Verlie has over 10 years’ experience teaching sustainability and climate change in universities, as well as experience in community-based climate change communication and activism. She has a multidisciplinary background, brings an intersectional feminist and multispecies approach to her work and is passionate about supporting people to engage with the emotional intensities of climate change. Verlie is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Urban Futures at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. (See “Learning to Live with Climate Change”)
Amanda Vincent is Adjunct Lecturer, Dept. of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Florida. Her primary research interest is the creation and representation of designed spaces including parks, gardens, and cities. The author of several articles on twentieth century parks, architecture, and urban design in Paris and the Île-de-France region, she is working on a book on “Constructing Nature, Cultivating the City: Paris Parks, 1977–1995.” (See Fall 2015 ICC Colloquium)
Jorge Volpi is the author of the international bestseller In Search of Klingsor, winner of the Biblioteca Breve Prize and the Deux Océans-Grinzane Cavour Prize in 1999. In 2010 he won Chile’s prestigious José Donoso Prize. In 2011 he won the Planeta-América Prize with La tejedora de sombras. His most recent novel, Las elegidas (2014), in verse, was the source of David Pablos’s film Las elegidas (2015). Volpi’s books have been translated into 25 languages. Currently he is the Director of the Festival Internacional Cervantino, the most important performing arts and music festival in Latin America. In early 2018 he was named the winner of the Alfaguara literary prize. (See “Daring or Collusion?”)
Phillip Wegner is Professor and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002), Life Between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989-2001 (2009), Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (2014), and Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (2014). (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)
Andréa Zhouri is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where she founded the Group in Environmental Studies (GESTA) and coordinated the team that created the undergraduate track in SocioEnvironmental Sciences. She has long researched topics related to socio-environmental conflicts and environmental inequalities. An active member of several environmental networks and scientific associations, including the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA), she has published widely on mining, large dams, environmental conflicts, and environmental deregulation in Brazil. (See “Global-Cultural Environmental Justice: Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Perspectives”)
Andrew Zimmerman is an Associate Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Florida. With over 120 publications, his area of research is carbon cycling in soils, sediments and aquatic systems. In addition to developing and teaching “Climate Change Science and Solutions,” a UF Grand Challenges Core course, he teaches “Introduction to Oceanography,” “Sustainability and the Changing Earth,” and “Organic Geochemistry and Geobiology.” (See Spring 2016 ICC Colloquium)