Who we are
Our teaching and shared scholarship in engaged environmental humanities brought us to this project. Liquid Landscapes emerged from over a year of planning, which began in March 2016 when we developed a team presentation on wetland aesthetics and resilient design as tools for uncovering layered Black histories encompassing North Carolina’s Dismal Swamp ecosystem and the New York City waterfront.
We have previously collaborated as co-faculty in the Sustainability MA Program and have co-taught courses on ecofeminism and environmental studies. We came to the topic of this course after a number of classroom and scholarly collaborations that centered on hydrocultures and ecotones, spanning a period of three centuries (19th century to present.)
Judith Madera works in Black geography and environmental humanities. She is the author of Black Atlas and recent essays about Caribbean environments in the Journal of Transatlantic American Literature and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She delivered the 2016 keynote for the NEH Advanced Institute in Digital Humanities on race and place in Africana Studies
At Wake Forest she teaches about literature of the Americas (Black Atlantic literature, Caribbean studies, and radical ecologies.) She has trained students in GIS and has facilitated a variety of multimedia student learning projects in conjunction with such community organizations as Boys & Girls Club: Garden Club; The Farm at the Children’s Home; Forsyth Animal Control; the Piedmont Environmental Alliance; SECU House and the Yadkin Riverkeeper.
David Phillips has focused in his scholarship on the intersection of the fields of public humanities, environmental humanities, and digital humanities. A founding member of the Humanities Institute of Wake Forest University, he is active in digital humanities and public humanities projects, with publications including “Publishing Makerspace: A New Approach to Scholarly Publishing” co-authored for the Proceedings of the Charleston Library Conference.
His interest in academic models that enable public engagement include his co-edited book Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Changing Currents in Education and Public Life (Edward Elgar Press, 2013). In 2013-2016, he participated as a Primary Investigator in the Mellon Foundation funded grant Humanities for the Environment, engaging in both research and course-based environmental humanities investigations of central North Carolina, as web developer for the project’s website, and as director of Wake Forest University’s Community Mapping Project, a collaborative community based research initiative.
With an academic background in urban planning, planning history, architecture and urban design, Phillips has utilized his knowledge in place-based, community-based and culture studies to examine the relationship between the humanities, community, and design. Community organizations he has worked with in forging partnerships for student research projects and the Community Mapping Project include the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest NC, the Sierra Club, Forsyth Backpack Program, Piedmont Environmental Alliance, Yadkin Riverkeeper, and Forsyth Futures.