About

Learn more about the aims of empirical ecocriticism, the mission of this website, and the people involved.

AIMS

Empirical ecocriticism is an emerging subfield of ecocriticism that focuses on the empirically-grounded study of environmental narrative – in literature, film, television, etc. – and its influence on various audiences. The main objective of empirical ecocriticism is to put to empirical test claims made within ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities more generally, about the impact of environmental narratives. To this end, it employs empirical methods used in disciplines such as environmental communication, environmental psychology, and the empirical study of literature. These include correlational and experimental studies, and others.

In our current working definition, empirical ecocriticism is

  • Empirically grounded
  • Open to qualitative and exploratory methodologies
  • Focused on the effects of narrative strategies and techniques, with the kind of depth and nuance that cultural critics have brought to their research for decades
  • Open to critical engagement with competing definitions of “empirical” data

While empirical ecocriticism focuses on employing established empirical methods, it therefore remains open to different characterizations of empirical data and to the use of humanistic methods as well, including those characteristic of traditional ecocriticism, such as textual and historical analysis.

One the central aims of this interdisciplinary field is to gain a better understanding of the role of environmental narratives in influencing people’s awareness, attitudes, and behavior in a time of rapid social and ecological transformation. Combining approaches from the humanities and the social sciences, empirical ecocriticism explores the ways in which people from various cultural backgrounds engage with environmental narratives and the larger repercussions of such engagement.

MISSION 

The mission of this website is to facilitate the development of empirical ecocriticism by providing information, compiling relevant publications, and enabling cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration.

It is designed to:

PEOPLE

The people behind this website

Wojciech Małecki is Associate Professor of Literary Theory at the Institute of Polish Philology, University of Wrocław, Poland. He is the author of two books, Embod­ying Pragmatism (Lang, 2010) and Human Minds and Animal Stories (Routledge, 2019), the editor or co-editor of four collec­tions of essays, and he has published numerous book chapters and contributed to jour­nals such as Teksty Drugie, The OxfordLiterary Review, Foucault Studies, Angelaki, Journal of Ecocriticism, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Journal of Compa­rative Litera­ture and Aesthetics, PLOS One, Poetics, and others. His research interests include American pragmatism, the theory of interpretation, the environmental humani­ties, aesthetics, popular culture, and the empirical study of literature.

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is Associate Professor of English at Colby College. His research employs literary criticism, communication studies, and qualitative sociology to examine cultural and political responses to contemporary environmental challenges, with a focus on climate change. He has published articles and book chapters on literature, popular culture, environmental futures, and environmental politics, and he is the author of Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture (U of Chicago P, 2015), the co-editor of An Ecotopian Lexicon (U of Minnesota P, 2019), and editor of Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore (Ethos, 2020).

Nicolai Skiveren is a PhD Fellow at the School of Communication and Culture, Department of English at Aarhus University in Denmark. His PhD project, Cinematic Wasthetics, examines the role of waste in contemporary cinema and film and reflects on visual media’s role in representing the complex intersecting crises and possibilities of the Anthropocene. His article on spectral toxicity in HBO’s Chernobyl was published in Ekphrasis in 2020.

Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. Her publications include Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017), Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014) and articles in journals such as ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Communication, Textual Practice and the Poetics Today. Her research explores contemporary environmental culture from a cognitive ecocritical perspective, including empirical studies.

Frank Hakemulder is Assistant Professor at the Department for Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. He specializes in the psychology of literature, focusing on the effects of reading literary texts on outgroup attitudes and moral self-concept. On this subject he has published several books and articles, among them The Moral Laboratory. Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept (Benjamins, 2000), Scientific Methods for the Humanities (Benjamins, 2012) and Narrative Absorption (Benjamins, 2017) He also conducts studies concerning the reception of film and trains students in the Humanities in research methods, especially experimentation.

Other researchers who investigate environmental narratives empirically

Jan Alber is Professor of English Literature and Cognitive Studies at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and Past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative . Hereceived fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Humboldt Foundation.In 2013, the German Association of University Teachers of English awarded him the prize for the best Habilitation written between 2011 and 2013.From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a COFUND (Marie-Curie) Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (Denmark).

Jepri Ali Saiful is an Assistant Professor of English Education at the Department of English Education, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Muhammadiyah University of Surabaya, Indonesia. He is now a PhD Candidate in the International Graduate Program of Education and Human Development, College of Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. His research interests include English Language Teaching (ELT), sustainable development, teacher professional development, and ecocriticism. He introduced and coined a term “Eco-ELT” in his publication, New Innovation in English Language Teaching: Revealing Concepts and Applications of Eco-ELT (2020). He also published An Ecocriticism Course and its development of English Pre-service Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge of Sustainability (PCKS) (2022). His recent studies are on how environmental texts impact English students’ inner sustainable development skills and qualities. In most of his works, he employed a mixed-method research design: quantitative (quasi-experiment) and qualitative.

Pat Brereton works in the School of Communications at Dublin City University (DCU) Ireland and is interested in investigating environmental narratives empirically. His environmental books include Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (2005);Environmental Ethics and Film (2016) and his upcoming Environmental Literacy: Digital Media Audiences (2019). Alongside book chapters and journal articles, he has also works on a number of funded research projects on media coverage of environmental issues including a national Citizen’s Assembly response to Climate Change in Ireland. Committed to an interdisciplinary study of environmentalism, he remains focused on examining audio-visual narratives.

Eni Buljubašić is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at theDepartment of Croatian language and literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split. Her doctoral thesis (2017) in interdisciplinary humanities investigated “neoklapa”, a heritage-turned-popular music phenomenon and its Mediterranean national identity articulations. Eni has published over 10 scientific papers in literary and cultural studies, critical heritage studies and stylistics. She is currently pursuing her interests in ecocriticism and environmental humanities, with a focus on Croatian literature, culture, and media. She is researching climate fiction, children’s literature and Anthropocene narratives.

Marco Caracciolo is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. Marco’s work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of several books, including most recently Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (University of Virginia Press, 2021) and With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (co-authored with Karin Kukkonen; Ohio State University Press, 2021).

Judith Eckenhoff is currently pursuingher PhD on the topic of PostapocalypticStoryworlds. She holds a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies and works as aresearch and teaching assistant at the Chair for Cognitive Literary Studies atRWTH Aachen University. Besides empirical ecocriticism, her research interestsinclude speculative fiction and posthumanism, as well as Gothic and horrorstudies. She is a member of the Aachen Research Team CogLit, the Center forHuman-Animal Studies Aachen, and the interdisciplinary RWTH Aachen ERS project The Apocalyptic Dimensions of Global ClimateChange in Contemporary Models and Discourses.

Rachel Fetherston is a PhD candidate in Literary Studies and Social Science at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia where she is investigating the representation of the native nonhuman in Australian ecofiction and the impact that such fiction has on readers’ connectedness to nature. She is also co-founder and publications manager of the nature connection charity Remember The Wild.

Daniel Jonusas has recently completed an MSc in Climate Change: Environment, Science & Policy from King’s College London. Previously in 2019, he served as Director and Workshop Facilitator at The Greenhouse Theatre, the first ever zero-waste performance venue at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Since that time, he has become fascinated both by the ways in which cultural climate change content can engage with public behaviour and global policy, and the ways in which this engagement can be measured. Daniel used his postgraduate dissertation to develop a viewer-response framework to understand the potential for depictions of climate change in cinema and television to promote agency in viewers. He currently works as Program Researcher for EarthPercent, a high-profile charity exploring the ways in which the music industry can use their art to fund and advocate for international climate action.

Karin Fikkers is assistant professor at the department of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Utrecht University. She aims to understand how stories can contribute to positive changes in people’s behavior – with a specific interest in sustainable behaviors. Karin has a background in communication science and media psychology, and previously studied effects of audiovisual media entertainment on children and adolescents using longitudinal survey research and experiments. She is currently working on various projects related to interactive narratives, in which she aims to better understand (both through qualitative and quantitative methods) how such productions communicate with and affect their users.

Salma Monani is Associate Professor and Chair at Gettysburg College’s Environmental Studies department. She is an ecomedia scholar, and is co-editor, with Steve Rust and Sean Cubitt, of Ecocinema Theory and Practice (Routledge/AFI 2013), and Ecomedia: Key Concepts (Routledge/Earthscan 2015), and lead editor (with Joni Adamson) on Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies (Routledge/Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Literature, forthcoming 2016).  She has also extensively published on explorations of film and environmental justice, film festival studies, and indigenous eco-activism, and is currently working on a monograph titled Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Landscapes (in contract with University of West Virginia¹s Salvaging the Anthropocene Series).

Meryl Shriver-Rice developed, directs, and teaches for the Master’s program in Environment, Culture, & Media at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy at the University of Miami. As both a media anthropologist and paleoethnobotanist, Dr. Shriver-Rice’s interdisciplinary background includes dual degrees in Anthropology and Biology, a Master’s degree in Archaeology from the University of Nottingham, England, and a Ph.D in Communication from the University of Miami. She is the 2018 recipient (with Juliana Fernandez and Cameron Riopelle) of a pilot study grant from the Center for Communication, Culture, and Change for the project: An Audience Study of Formal Variables in Digital Short-Form Environmental Media. .

Scott Slovic is professor of literature and environment and professor of natural resources at society at the University of Idaho, USA. The author, editor, or coeditor of twenty-seven books, ranging fromSeeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992) to The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019), he served as the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and has edited the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment since 1995. He currently also serves as coeditor of Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment. Together with the psychologist Paul Slovic, he is the editor of  Numbers and Nerves (2015).

Eline Tabak is PhD Candidate in Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center (LMU Munich) who is interested in environmental literature and the ways art practices respond to environmental crises. She is currently working on a qualitative reader-response study on climate change fiction and narratives of insect decline.

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