Participants
Jane Alberdeston Coralin teaches creative writing at Binghamton University (SUNY) and at the University of Puerto Rico - Arecibo. Her work has been published in various anthologies and journals, such as Paterson Literary Review, Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, The Acentos Review, Rock and Sling: A Journal of Witness. Her speculative novel Colony 51 is due for release in November 2023 by Jaded Ibis Press, and she continues to work on her short story collection Vivid Gods.
Marco Armiero is Icrea Research Professor at the Institute for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also the founder of ToxicBios, an archive of personal stories of contamination and resistance at the KTH/Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where for ten years he directed the Environmental Humanities Laboratory. His research focuses on toxic waste, migrations and environment, and climate change, the city, science, and power in ecological conflicts, and he works on environmental justice at global, local, and transnational scales. Armiero is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and books, including Wastocene: Stories from the Global Dump and A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy; and he is co-editor of the groundbreaking volumes, Environmental History of Modern Migrations;Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene; Teresa e le altre. Storie di donne nelle Terra dei Fuochi; and A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories. He serves as a senior editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism (T&F) and an associate editor of Environmental Humanities (Duke UP). Since 2019, he has been the elected president of the European Society for Environmental History. With his research, Armerio bridges environmental humanities and political ecology.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay leads the international research group CoFUTURES, and is the principal investigator of two major research projects, “CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents” (European Research Council) and “Science Fictionality” (Norwegian Research Council), which explore contemporary global futurisms movements from a transmedial perspective, including literature, film, visual arts, and games). He is manager and co-founder (with Moumita Sen) of Theory from the Margins, a research collective with over 16,000 followers worldwide. Chattopadhyay is an Associate Professor of Global Culture Studies at the University of Oslo. He is also an Imaginary College Fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. He has served as an innovations consultant with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and has been a visiting researcher at the Department of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine and the Evoke Lab/Calit2, as well as the Department of English, University of Liverpool.
He has served as co-Editor-in-Chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research and the Journal of Science Fiction. He is also founding co-editor (with Taryne Taylor) of the Routledge book series Studies in Global Genre Fiction. Chattopadhyay has written or edited ten books, published numerous articles, exhibited in six transnational art projects, and produced the award-winning film, “Kalpavigyan: A Speculative Journey,” the first documentary on science fiction from India and Bengal. His latest work is the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms–coedited with Grace Dillon, Isiah Lavender III, and Taryne Taylor – a 400,000 word essay collection featuring a stunning range of work from around the world on contemporary futurisms, including Indigenous Futurisms, Afro and African futurisms, Latinx and Latin American futurisms, and Asian Futurisms. Other than his research and artistic research grants, he is also the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious World Fantasy Award (2020), the Johannes H Berg Memorial Prize (2019), the Foundation Essay Prize (2017), and the Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll Award (2013). His research website is: https://cofutures.org.
Alex Gil Fuentes is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela). His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Divya Gupta is an environmental social scientist. Her research and teaching focus on international environmental policies and politics. She is especially interested in understanding and exploring the roles of diverse state and non-state actors in local-level governance, development, and justice. Divya has been conducting empirical research in India and Nepal, looking at the community-based response to changes like climate and the pandemic. She is also working with her network of collaborators to study the implementation of contemporary decentralization and rights-based approaches in forest management in the global south.
Savannah Paige Murray holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing from Virginia Tech and is an interdisciplinary scholar in the environmental humanities with disciplinary training in rhetoric and a geographical focus on the Appalachian region in the U.S. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at Appalachian State University where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in first year writing, technical and professional communication, environmental rhetoric, and Appalachian literature. Her current book project, The Dam Fighters, explores the rhetorical strategies of grassroots environmentalists who successfully opposed the creation of 14 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dams on the French Broad River in her hometown of Asheville, North Carolina.
Belinda Walzer joined the Appalachian State University English faculty in the Rhetoric and Composition program in Fall 2018. While completing her PhD, she spent time as a Research Associate at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Walzer’s research focuses on human rights and temporality and international higher education. She has won several curriculum innovation and research grants around international higher education and social justice research. She has experience teaching first year and advanced writing, rhetorical studies, advocacy writing, community writing, composition studies, gender studies, human rights and literature, postcolonial studies as well as graduate courses in global studies and human rights.