Wojciech Małecki, Assistant Professor of Literary Theory, Institute of Polish Philology, University of Wrocław, Poland

Wojciech 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 Oxford Literary Review, Foucault Studies, Angelaki, Journal of Ecocriticism, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, PLOS One, Poetics, and others. Wojciech’s research interests include American pragmatism, the theory of interpretation, the environmental humanities, aesthetics, popular culture, and the empirical study of environmental literature. He is currently co-editing a thematic cluster of articles for the leading ecocritical journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Alexa Weik von Mossner. With Alexa Weik von Mossner, Wojciech Małecki, and Frank Hakemulder, he is co-editing an edited volume on the topic.

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Environmental Studies), Yale-NUS College

Matthew's research employs literary criticism, qualitative social science, and cultural history 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 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and the co-editor of An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Together with Alexa Weik von Mossner, Matthew co-organized an interdisciplinary workshop on Empirical Ecocriticism at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and is co-editing a thematic cluster of articles for the leading ecocritical journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. With Alexa Weik von Mossner, Wojciech Małecki, and Frank Hakemulder, he is co-editing an edited volume on the topic.

Alexa Weik von Mossner, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Klagenfurt in Austria

After working for several years in the German film and television industry, Alexa earned her PhD in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. Her research explores contemporary environmental culture from a cognitive ecocritical perspective, including empirical studies. Her publications include the monographs Cosmopolitan Minds (U of Texas P 2014) and Affective Ecologies (Ohio State UP 2017), as well as articles in journals such as Poetics Today, ISLE, and Textual Practice. Currently, Alexa is principal investigator on the research project “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures” (2018-2021), which has been funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and combines cognitive narratological analysis with experimental reception studies. Together with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa has co-organized an interdisciplinary workshop on Empirical Ecocriticism at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and is co-editing a thematic cluster of articles for the leading ecocritical journal ISLE. Together with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Wojciech Małecki and Frank Hakemulder, she is co-editing an edited volume on the topic.

Frank Hakemulder, Assistant Professor, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Utrecht University), and affiliated full professor at the Reading Centre (Stavanger University).

With a background in Literary Studies, Frank specializes in the psychology of reading literature. His research pertains to the effects of reading literary narrative fiction on wellbeing, attitude change, self-concept, and social perception. 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 both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Frank participated in the Empirical Ecocriticism Workshop at the Rachel Carson Center in December 2018 and subsequently joined Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Wojciech Małecki, and Alexa Weik von Mossner as an editor on the Empirical Ecocriticism volume.