Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and a member of the Climate Change Focus Group. She has published many articles on topics ranging from literary theory and the internal combustion engine to the temporality of carbon management. Professor Pinkus has published widely in Italian culture, literary theory, cinema, visual theory, and environmental theory. Aside from Italian she also works with French, Latin, German, Spanish, and is learning Swedish.

She has several ongoing research projects:
1) a new book tentatively titled Autonomia/ Automata: Machines for Writing, Laboring and Thinking in 1960s Italy, that explores issues around labor, automation and repetition in Italian art, literature, design, and film of the 60s. In part, this work is in dialogue with contemporary Italian thought, especially as regards the question of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the question of wages.

2) Her new book Fuel (November 2016) thinks about issues crucial to climate change by arguing for a separation of fuel (perhaps understood as potentiality, or dynamis, to use the Aristotelian term) from energy as a system of power (actuality, use).  Fuel follows a series of literary, filmic, and critical texts through the form of a dictionary (from “air” to “zyklon D”).  Fuel engages with literature, art and critical theory as they are central to analogy and in turn, to fuel itself.

For about the past ten years, most of her work has been directed toward thinking about the humanities in relation to climate change. Professor Pinkus is on the editorial boards of diacritics and World Picture Journal. For diacritics, she edited a special issue on climate change criticism (43.1), thirty years on from the influential issue on nuclear criticism.

Lindsey Green-Simms’ teaching and research focuses on African and post-colonial film and literature. Her particular interests include globalization, technology, gender and sexuality studies, and Nollywood video-film production. Professor Green-Simms’ forthcoming book, Postcolonial Automobility: Cars, Cultural Production, and Global Mobility in West Africa, examines how the contradictions of globalization are embedded in the commodity of the automobile and in the ideals of automobility. She is also working on a second book, provisionally titled Unbelonging Bodies: Same-Sex Sexualities and African Screen Media. Professor Green-Simms completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and has previously taught at Duke University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in Women’s Studies, as well as at the College of Charleston. She has published articles in Camera Obscura, transition, Journal of African Cinemas, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has book chapters in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio U. Press) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Rodopi Press).

Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and Adjunct Professor of interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of energy and environmental studies, literary and cultural theory, social and political philosophy (esp. 19th and 20th left theory, globalization and nationalism), and Canadian studies. Szeman is the recipient of the John Polanyi Prize in Literature (2000), the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2003), the Scotiabank-AUCC Award for Excellence in Internationalization (2004), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2005-7), the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision at McMaster University (2008), a Killam Annual Professorship (2013), and the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research (2015), the U of Alberta’s most prestigious research award that recognizes research excellence in humanities, social sciences, law, education and fine arts. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the US Cultural Studies Association. He is currently finishing up work on On Empty: The Cultural Politics of Oil.

Evan Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University and Co-Director of the Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs master’s program. His research examines the intersections among religion, globalization, and climate change, and seeks to advance knowledge about the role of religious actors in contemporary environmental controversy. Beginning with the premise that religion and religious ideas serve to locate human beings in the natural order, his scholarship concentrates on the cultural particularities of environmental ethics—the ways that different religious perspectives generate divergent ecological orientations. Pursuing these questions through both ethnographic research and philosophical reflection, his current work includes a study of religious civil society groups actively engaged with the challenge of climate change. His book, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism, was recently published by the University of California Press.

Arielle Bernstein is a writer, professor, and cultural critic who lives in Washington, DC and has been teaching in AU’s Writing Studies Program since 2008. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic , Slate Magazine, Salon, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She is represented by Christopher Rhodes at The Stuart Agency.

Leslie Ries is the Project Director of the North American Butterfly Monitoring Network. Leslie’s background is in butterfly ecology and her interests are in using butterfly data to understand how ecological communities respond to climate and land-use change.

Ries is an ecologist who focuses on patterns at both medium and large scales. She has worked both in the fields of landscape ecology and biogeography with her focus mainly on butterflies. Over the last 10 years, she has shifted from a field approach to using large databases, mostly originating from citizen science monitoring networks. Citizen science greatly expands the scale at which we can collect data and thus explore problems and solutions that are increasingly global in nature.

Ries focuses on several facets of citizen-science, including the use of these data to answer large-scale ecological questions, especially those related to climate and land cover; developing statistical tools to extract the most robust information from the data; designing systems to support data management, visualization, and sharing; and developing “knowledge” databases that compile life history and other trait data to enrich multi-species analyses. In addition to carrying out and enabling large-scale ecological research, Ries has also been working on methods to integrate big-data approaches into undergraduate education, and she is also increasingly interested in informal education opportunities as well.

She is currently affiliated with Georgetown University where she continues work on the physiological limits to growth imposed by extreme temperatures. Combining lab and field research with large-scale distribution data could provide a powerful approach to exploring the impacts of changing land cover and climate at regional, continental and global scales.

Claire Brunel is an assistant professor at American University. She is particularly interested in providing empirical evidence of the links between environmental policies and international competitiveness. For example, she asks whether policies that encouraged the use and the development of renewable energies in the OECD led to an increase in domestic innovation and manufacturing, or rather to a rise in the licensing and importing of foreign technologies. Other works examine the role of the offshoring of polluting industries in emissions reductions of EU and US manufacturing and how to measure the stringency of environmental policies.