Biographical Information
© 2016 Larry Smith Photography
What are the rights, responsibilities, and privileges associated with U.S. citizenship? How does one’s (non/un/post/human) legal status relate to environmental sustainability? In my work, I teach, research, and write about sustainable citizenship.
I hold a Ph.D. in English Literature from SUNY Stony Brook University, an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Long Island University/Post, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Eastern Illinois University, as well as two Sorbonne French language certificates. My research areas include: nineteenth-century literature, cinema studies, and the environmental humanities. I have taught undergraduate Humanities’ courses at public and private universities, a community college, and a military service academy. My recent teaching experience includes: Foundations of College Composition, Foundations of Research, Communications for the Technical Professions, Modern Drama, Introduction to Fiction, Nature in the Nineteenth-Century, Ecopoetics, and The Modern Victorian Environment.
My dissertation, “The Sustainable Victorians?” examines the spectrum of sustainability in novels, prose, and poems of the nineteenth-century. My research has been published in Adaptation, Dickens Studies Annual, Kritika Kultura, and The Journal of Ecocriticism. The “The Climate of Ecocinema,” an article I co-authored with E. Ann Kaplan, appears in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. My "Foreword" for Simon C. Estok's The Ecophobia Hypothesis is part of the Routledge series in world literatures and the environment.
Other recent research presentations include ecocritical talks on American poets Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the history of drinking water on Long Island, AI for Research & Teaching, the Dickens Society Symposium and Friends of Dickens New York. I have presented in North America, Europe, and China at MLA, NAVSA, ASLE, the International James Joyce Symposium, the Modernist Studies Association, NeMLA, M/MLA, INCS, Victorian Poetry, the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI).
My public and digital humanities work can be viewed in the YouTube food studies’ presentation “What’s Cookin? American Teens and Sustainable Food Systems,” which first offers a theoretical argument for the “flexitarian” reduced meat diet, then portrays best practices for teen vegetarians, and concludes by interviewing the Chief Scientist of the Impossible Burger. “The Emergence of Climate Change Populism in Ecocinema” (part of the UC Santa Barbara The World in 2050: Imagining and Creating Just Climate Futures’ conference) is also available on YouTube, and features ecocritical analyses of films such as Mad Max: Fury Road.
I was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies second place student essay award. I have been the principal investigator on two federal grants, and, as the co-principal investigator for the Stony Brook FAHSS funded-project, “Documenting Climate Change,” I have worked with a team of SUNY research faculty coordinating seminars, public humanities’ events, and film screenings. My service to the profession includes work as the Assistant Editor and Copy Editor at the Cambridge journal Victorian Literature and Culture as well as the Women’s Studies Representative at the Northeast Modern Language Association. I am currently the Chair of the NYSC AAUP Long Island Regional Council and I am also a reviewer for the U.S. Department of Education.
