Publishing in Environmental Justice, Naturecultural Studies, and Environmental Humanities, Part I: Editorial Perspectives Roundtable

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable session responds to the conference call for inquiry into “Late-Stage American Empire” by convening a discussion of publishing across environmental justice, climate justice, decolonization, naturecultural studies, American studies, and the environmental humanities. This roundtable draws together a range of editors working in scholarly book and journal publishing, including representatives from University of California Press, Duke University Press, University of Minnesota Press, and University of Washington Press, as well as editors at journals American Quarterly (ASA), ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal (NAIS). The fields of study represented on the roundtable are capacious, drawing together editors working across multiple intersections in American studies, including Native and Indigenous studies, Black studies, Feminist and Queer ecologies, critical ethnic studies, literary studies, political ecology, science studies, etc. Along with discussing trends and experiences working across these fields, participants will discuss the shifting landscape of academic publishing, including rising interest in studies of climate justice, Native and Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, environmental justice, racial ecologies, etc.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Daniel Lanza Rivers, San Jose State University

Panelists

• Jason M Ruiz, University of Notre Dame

• Gina Starblanket, University of Victoria

• Christina Gerhardt

• Larin McLaughlin, University of Washington-Seattle Campus

• Leah Pennywark, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Naja Pullam Collins, University of California-Berkeley

Biographical Information

Courtney Berger (Duke University Press)

Courtney Berger (she/they) is Executive Editor at Duke University Press. Courtney joined the Press in 2003, after receiving her Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins University. Courtney acquires books across the humanities and social sciences, including American studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, media and technology studies, and environmental humanities. She also oversees the Elements series, which highlights interdisciplinary scholarship on earth, water, air, chemicals, minerals, fuels, plastics, and other substances. Courtney seeks out books that are theoretically and politically engaged and that speak to a wide, interdisciplinary audience. She has published books by many prominent scholars, but she also enjoys collaborating with first-time authors who are in the process of establishing their critical voice.

Naja Pullam Collins (University of California Press)

Naja Pulliam Collins is Environmental Studies and Geography Editor at University of California Press. Within Environmental Studies and Geography, she is eager to acquire books that contribute to UC Press’ mission of pushing paradigms with a focus on social justice and looks forward to finding projects that explore questions around place, resilience, justice, and culture in innovative ways. She is excited by the opportunity to work with authors whose research addresses the most urgent questions surrounding environmental justice on a global scale. Recent highlights from her lists include Jade Sasser’s Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question, Lindsey Dillon’s Toxic City, Claire Mercer’s The Suburban Frontier, and The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators, edited by Sarah Ray and Jennifer Atkinson. She edits several series, including the Critical Environments series, the Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture series, and the Antipode book series.

Christina Gerhardt (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment)

Christina Gerhardt (she/her) is the Leir Chair of Comparative Literature at Clark University and co-founder of the Environmental Humanities at Clark; former Barron Professor of Environmental Humanities at the High Meadows Environment Institute at Princeton University (2021-2022); and a permanent Senior Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught previously. Professor Gerhardt has been awarded fellowships by the Fulbright Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, and held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin and Columbia University. She is also an environmental journalist. Her writing has been published (under “Tina Gerhardt”) in The Guardian, Grist, The Nation, Orion and Sierra Magazine, among other venues. She is Editor-in-Chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), published by Oxford University Press. She is the author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, published by the University of California Press and named one of the “Best Popular Science Books of 2023” by the New Scientist, called “a work of art” by the LA Times and a Silver Medal Award winner for both the Nautilus Book Award and the California Book Award.

Larin McLaughlin (University of Washington Press)

Larin McLaughlin is editor-in-chief of the University of Washington Press. In 2020, McLaughlin was named the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) Constituency Award honoree. She is the principal investigator of the Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship Program, which created opportunities for talented scholars from diverse communities to work in university press acquisitions departments. McLaughlin developed and led the program in its first three years with three partner presses—Duke, Georgia, and MIT—and also won a second grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand the program with five partner presses—Chicago, Cornell, MIT, Northwestern, and Ohio State—in 2019. Prior to joining the staff of the University of Washington Press in 2014, McLaughlin served as an acquiring editor at the University of Illinois Press and SUNY Press. Her highly collaborative acquisitions work, influenced by regular participation in the Ford Foundation Fellowship conferences, has contributed to such fields as Native American and Indigenous studies; Asian American studies; African American studies; critical ethnic studies; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Leah Pennywark (University of Minnesota Press)
Leah Pennywark (she/her) is Humanities Editor at the University of Minnesota Press. Before joining the Press in 2019, she served as assistant editor at Stanford University Press. Prior to that, she served as acquisitions assistant at Purdue University Press, where she completed a PhD in American literature. Leah seeks innovative book projects that offer new ways of thinking about culture, literature, and media. She values interdisciplinary work in emerging areas of scholarship as well as manuscripts that speak to broader audiences, particularly within the fields of disability studies, queer and transgender studies, environmental humanities, and feminism. Her editorial interests include justice and equity, race and ethnicity studies, avant-garde and experimental cinema, digital culture and new media, gender and sexuality, and literary criticism.

[wheelchair user; speech impairment, though talking is not uncomfortable]

Daniel Lanza Rivers (Chair)

Daniel Lanza Rivers (they/them) is an Associate Professor of American Studies & Literature at San José State University, where they coordinate the certificate in environmental humanities and teach courses in transnational and decolonial American studies, environmental studies, literature, and queer and trans studies. Daniel’s current book project, California Futures, explores naturecultural entanglements between practices of environmental speculation and commercial extraction across California’s colonial history. Along with mapping histories of colonial ecological violence, California Futures queries radical, dissident, and decolonial archives that locate environmental justice and land return as rallying points for the creation of feminist, queer, Indigenous, anticolonial, Black, Latine, and anti-white supremacist futures. Daniel’s writing has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Terrain.org, The San Francisco Chronicle, Joyland, Apogee, Bay Area News Matters, Sex Change and the City (forthcoming from GirlDad Press) and Writing the Golden State: the New Literary Terrain of California, among others. Daniel also served as editor for the special issue of Women’s Studies titled “Futures of Feminist Science Studies” (2019). A Lambda Literary Fellow in Creative Nonfiction in 2024, Daniel is also at work on a collection of essays that uses archival research, science writing, and the lyric essay to explore, queer, trans, and neurodivergent folks’ relationships with each other and the living world.


Jason Ruiz (American Quarterly)

Jason Ruiz is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he is affiliated faculty with the Program in Gender Studies and the Institute for Latino Studies. He teaches courses in Latinx studies, race and representation, queer studies, and popular culture. He is the author of Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire and Narcomedia: Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America’s War on Drugs (both from the University of Texas Press, 2014 and 2023, respectively). He is also the principal investigator of Latinx Murals of Pilsen, a digital research project devoted to public art in Chicago supported by the Whiting Foundation. Ruiz is a 2016 recipient of the Edmund P. Joyce Award and 2019 Charles B. Sheedy Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Notre Dame. He is the Editor of American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association.

Gina Starblanket (Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal)

Gina Starblanket is an associate professor in the School of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria. She is Cree/Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4. Dr. Starblanket studies Indigenous–settler political relations with a specific focus on Indigenous politics in the prairies, the politics of treaty implementation and Indigenous movements towards social and political transformation. Professor Starblanket is co-editor of the journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAIS) and is the author of important sole and co-authored interventions theorizing relational responsibilities to one another and to the land, including the 3rd edition of Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Fernwood Press, 2024), Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial (ARP, 2020) and the fifth and sixth edition of Visions of the Heart: Issues Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada (OUP, 2019 and 2025).