All of our faculty participants are listed here (past and current)
COURSE COORDINATOR
Jacob Hamblin
Jacob Darwin Hamblin is Professor of History at Oregon State University. He also directs the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative. The author of Arming Mother Nature and other books, he writes about the history and politics of science, technology, and environmental issues. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and many publications devoted to the history of science, technology, and the natural world.
PARTICIPATING FACULTY
Julia Bradshaw
Julia Bradshaw is Associate Professor at Oregon State University where she teaches photography and video art. She is also a curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, Bradshaw has organized a number of exhibitions in California and in Oregon. In 2017, she curated “Totality” an exhibition of artworks concerned with our human relationship to Space; this coincided with the 2017 solar eclipse. As a writer, Bradshaw published several reviews in afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Criticism and wrote over twenty articles for the online blog ArtShift San José. Her research essay on the photography in the Fresno Feminist Art Program was published in Exposure, The Journal of the Society for Photographic Education. She has attended artist residencies at Djerassi in California and Playa in Oregon. Both of these residencies were supported by a grant from the Ford Family Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship by the Oregon Arts Commission. Bradshaw’s video-art and photography projects exhibit throughout the United States, Guatemala, The Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. She received her MFA from San José State University in 2007 with an emphasis on photography and video art.
Robert Figueroa
Robert Melchior Figueroa is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. He specializes in Environmental Justice Studies and Environmental Philosophy, as well as the Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Society. Inclusive of his research is work on Philosophy of Heritage, Environmental Identity, Climate Refugees, Critical Race and Latin@ Theory, Critical Geography, Feminist Philosophy, and Philosophy for Children. Rob is currently writing a book for Routledge, Environmental Justice as Environmental Ethics: A New Introduction, and his manuscript Extending Environmental Justice: Beyond Equity and Identity.
Hannah Gosnell
Hannah Gosnell is Associate Professor of Geography in the College of Earth, Atmospheric, and Ocean Sciences at OSU. She earned a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado in 2000. She specializes in human dimensions of global environmental change, rural geography, agricultural landscapes, ranching, and the U.S. West. Her research has appeared in Society and Natural Resources, Journal of the American Water Resources Association, and several other journals.
Evan Gottlieb
Evan Gottlieb is Professor of English at Oregon State University. He earned a PhD from the University at Buffalo, SUNY, in 2002. He specializes in eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature and culture, literary and critical theory, globalization, post-humanism, and Speculative Realism. His books include Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (Edinburgh University Press, September 2016); Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830. (Ohio State University Press, 2014); Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013); and Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707-1832 (Bucknell University Press, 2007).
Stephanie Jenkins
Stephanie Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University. She received her BA in Philosophy at Emory University in 2003, her MA in Philosophy from Pennsylvania State University in 2007 and her dual Ph.D. in Philosophy and Women’s Studies from Pennsylvania State University in 2012. Her dissertation, Disabling Ethics: A Genealogy of Ability, argues for a genealogy-based ethics that departs from traditional bioethical approaches to disability. Her research and teaching interests include 20th century continental philosophy (especially French), feminist philosophy, disability studies, critical animal studies, and ethics. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time outdoors (hiking, biking, and running), baking, and listening to live music.
Raymond Malewitz
Raymond Malewitz is Associate Professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. He specializes in contemporary American literature, literature and science, environmental literature, and material culture. He received a Ph.D. in English from theUniversity of Virginia in 2007. His recent book, The Practice of Misuse , examines creative acts of repurposing in American culture from the 1960s to the present. Setting works by Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Sam Shepard, Thomas Pynchon, Shelley Jackson, Chuck Palahniuk, and Don DeLillo alongside contemporary “maker communities” such as Instructables and IKEA Hacker, the book shows how rugged consumers challenge the assumption of single, pre-determined functions for objects.
Ehren Pflugfelder
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder is Assistant Professor in the school of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. He teaches courses in professional, technical, science, business, and web writing, as well as the teaching of writing, digital rhetoric, and new media literacy. He have a PhD in rhetoric and composition, with a focus in technical writing, from Purdue University. His research focuses on the relationship of classical rhetoric, technology, and mobility studies and he is hard at work on a book project that focuses on the same for the new Ashgate series “Studies in Technical Communication, Rhetoric, and Culture.”
Dana Reason
Dana Reason is a Canadian-born composer, pianist, and music researcher. She was part of The Space Between trio with electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros; is documented on over 14 recordings, and has created music for film, theatre, and large and small ensembles. In fall 2016, she toured with Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and his Heart of a Forest project. As a pianist, she was part of the soundtrack for Within Our Gates and Body and Soul (music by Paul Miller) on Pioneers of African-American Cinema (Kino-2016) and the PBS documentary soundtrack – Birth of a Movement (2017). As a performer, she has toured the U.S., Europe and Canada. Her composition “Currents” for wind ensemble as well as her trio album “Angle of Vision” were both long listed for GRAMMY awards in 2014. Reason exhibited her first conceptual sculpture, UnHeard, at CEI Artworks in 2016. Her research and writings are available at Wesleyan University Press, Columbia University Jazz Studies Online, 20th Century Music, and Musicworks Magazine. Reason holds a B.Mus (McGill University), MA in Composition (Mills College), and a PhD in Critical Studies / Experimental Practices in music (University of California, San Diego). She was the Director of Popular Music Studies at Oregon State University from 2011-2015 and is currently the Coordinator of Contemporary Music and Research at Oregon State University.
Allen Thompson
Dr. Thompson comes to OSU from the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Clemson University where he also worked with the Restoration Institute, the Rutland Institute for Ethics, and the doctoral program in Planning, Design, and the Built Environment. As an undergraduate he studied at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia WA, before earning his MA and PhD from the University of Washington, in Seattle. His primary areas of interest are environmental philosophy (including ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics), philosophical ethics, social and political philosophy, and practical reason. Recent publications have focused on forward-looking conceptions of human natural goodness and re-visioning our moral responsibility for managing ecosystems under conditions of global climate change.
Megan Ward
Megan Ward teaches and researches in the fields of Victorian literature and culture and the digital humanities, with interests in narrative theory, the history of the novel, material culture, the history of technology. Her current book project, Seeming Human: Victorian Realist Character and Artificial Intelligence (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), argues that early artificial intelligence gives us a theory of verisimilitude that helps us re-evaluate the realism of Victorian fictional characters. Her essays on realism and technology have appeared in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Configurations, Genre, and other journals. She is also Co-Director of Livingstone Online, an NEH-funded digital archive of the Victorian explorer David Livingstone.
Emily Yates-Doerr
I am an anthropologist with interest in health, food justice, and social inequality. I am currently researching a maternal/child nutrition policy called “La Ventana de Los Mil Dias” (the first 1000 days of life), which entails collaboration with health and development experts in Guatemala. My previous project traced the emergence of obesity in the Guatemalan highlands. I have longterm interest in translational medicine, the racialized and gendered figurations of “the body” in health sciences, and the methods of feminist anthropology. I hold a PhD from New York University; a Masters in Latin American Studies from Stanford University; and undergraduate degrees in Human Biology and Anthropological Sciences from Stanford University. I was raised at the edge of wilderness on a remote island in Alaska (part of one of the last state-supported homesteads in the US; an experience that has shaped my lifelong interest in urbanization, development, and the violence of settler colonialism). Before joining the faculty at OSU, I spent seven years at the University of Amsterdam. My first book, “The Weight of Obesity,” was published by California Press.
PAST PARTICIPATING FACULTY OUTSIDE OSU
Barbara Muraca
Barbara Muraca studied philosophy in Turin, Italy, and received her PhD in that subject from the University of Greifswald, Germany. Her dissertation focused on the philosophical foundations of Strong Sustainability. She specialized in environmental philosophy (sustainability theory & degrowth), social philosophy, and process thought. She has authored several articles on related topics including: “Towards a fair degrowth-society: Justice and the right to a ‘good life’ beyond growth, in: Futures (2012), “The Map of Moral Significance: a new matrix for environmental ethics, in:Environmental Values 20 (2011), and “Strong sustainability as a frame for sustainability communication (with Konrad Ott and Christian Baatz). In: Godemann, J., Michelsen, G. (Hg..): Sustainability Communication: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoretical Foundations. Springer 2010. Muraca taught at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Germany) before joining the OSU faculty. She now teaches at the University of Oregon.
Ricardo Rozzi
Ricardo Rozzi is a Chilean ecologist and philosopher who is professor and Director of the Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program (SBCP), coordinated by the University of North Texas in the US and by the University of Magallanes and the Millennium Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB) in Chile. His research combines ecological sciences and ethics through the study of the interrelations between the ways of knowing and inhabiting the natural world. He has developed a biocultural ethics that demands incorporating this value of the co-inhabitants subjects into development policies as a matter of socio-environmental justice. A higher recognition of the value of biocultural diversity demands an environmental justice that includes poor and marginalized people: the oppressed human beings side-by-side with the oppressed other-than-human beings.