I write on contemporary culture, the environment, and science and am Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Through March 2025, I’m a Mellon New Directions Fellow training in demography, reproductive health, women’s policy, and climate change at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I’m completing two books: Our Bodies, Our Climate explores the values that come into tension when people approach fertility and family in light of climate crisis and environmental changes impinge on reproductive intentions. Girl Striving is a memoir in essays that opens up unexplored dimensions of class in America through my experiences of place, dance, and books.

My books include Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020) and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014). Infowhelm was a finalist for the 2022 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Book Award and the 2021 ASLE-UK Ireland Book Prize. Ecosickness won the 2015 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Book Prize. My research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Whiting Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, UT Austin, and Stanford University.

My academic articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, CR: The New Centennial Review, New Literary History, Environmental Humanities, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Modern Fiction Studies, ASAP/Journal, ELN: English Language Notes, American Literary History, American Literature, Public Culture, Contemporary Literature, and several edited collections. You can find my public writing in many newspapers, The New York Review, Sierra Magazine, Dirt, Avidly, Yes! Magazine, LitHub, Public Books, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

I’m committed to building the environmental humanities and climate studies at UT Austin and beyond. To that end, I co-founded Planet Texas 2050, UT Austin’s inaugural grand research challenge focused on climate resilience, and I was the faculty chair in 2019-20. I served on the transportation advisory group for the City of Austin’s first Climate Equity Plan (2019-2021) and am working to implement the plan and create environmental policy as a member of Austin’s Joint Sustainability Commission (2022-).

I teach and advise students in the areas of contemporary US literature and culture, environmental humanities, medical humanities, science studies, women’s and gender studies, affect theory, data and culture, race and ethnic studies, and public humanities. As a first-generation, low-income (FGLI) college student, I’m especially eager to promote the learning and growth of students traditionally underserved in higher ed.