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Program in
Climate and Environmental Studies

Faculty

Faculty in the Program in Climate and Environmental Studies represent expertise from across the university. Consistent with the goals of the curriculum, perspectives from multiple disciplines are represented.

Program Faculty

David Hess, Program Director, James Thornton Fant Chair in Sustainability Studies, and Professor of Sociology

Zdravka Tzankova, Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Climate and Environmental Studies

Faculty Steering Committee

Joe Bandy, Associate Professor of the Practice, Sociology

Teresa Goddu, Professor of English and of American Studies

Steve Goodbred, Professor and Chair, Earth and Environmental Science

David Hess, Program Director, James Thornton Fant Chair in Sustainability Studies, and Professor of Sociology

Zdravka Tzankova, Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Climate and Environmental Studies

Arts and Science Faculty with Environmental Research and Teaching

Brooke Ackerly, Professor of Political Science

John Ayers, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Husile Bai, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Ralf Bennartz, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Ari Caramanica, Anthropology

Brianna Castro, Sociology

Lily Claiborne, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Beth Conklin, Anthropology

Larisa De Santis, Biology and of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Cailynn Dowler, Religious Studies

Jennifer Faye, English

Mabel Gergan, Asian Studies

Jonathan Gilligan, Earth and Environmental Sciences and of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Liz Haynes, Theater

Neil Kelley, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Maria Luisa (Malu) Jorge, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Amanda Little, English Department and Communication of Science and Technology Program

Michelle Marcus, Economics

Lin Meng, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Dan Morgan, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Jessica Oster,  Earth and Environmental Sciences

Tasha Rijke-Epstein, History

Betsey Robinson, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture

Jacob Sauer, Anthropology

Anand Taneja, Associate Professor of Religion

Rachel Teukolsky, English

 

Cross-School Faculty Liaisons

Mark Abkowitz, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Engineering Management

Yolanda McDonald, Assistant Professor of Human and Organizational Development, Peabody College

Lori Troxel, Professor of the Practice of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Affiliated Postdoctoral Fellows

Eric Moses Gurevitch received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2022 conferred jointly by the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science. His dissertation was awarded the Dissertation Award on the Formation of Knowledge from the University of Chicago and the Mohini Jain Presidential Chair in Jain Studies Best Dissertation Award from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. His research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He is a co-convener of the Science Across Regions in Asia working group that is hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine and the Environmental Humanities Seminar at Vanderbilt University. He is currently working on a monograph titled Everyday Sciences: Making Knowledge Local in South Asia.

Anna Hill [she/her] received her Ph.D. in English from Yale University in December 2022. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, with a particular emphasis on environmental criticism, memory studies, and postcolonial/decolonial studies. Her current book project explores how late-twentieth-century authors reworked major genres of the American novel in light of emergent discourses about environmental crisis and global climate change. This project proposes that, as a dynamic vehicle of place-based, more-than-human memory, the realist novel offers a generative resource for environmental imagining and environmental justice in the Anthropocene. Her academic writing is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and her work has been supported by the Yale Environmental Humanities Program, the National Humanities Center, and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, among others. She is a co-convener of the Environmental Humanities Seminar at Vanderbilt University.

Matthew Plishka holds a PhD in History from the University of Pittsburgh with specializations in Environmental and Latin American/Caribbean History along with the Digital Humanities. Dr. Plishka works at the intersection of social and environmental history to examine how marginalized communities navigate ecological crises. His book project, Cycles of Crisis and Adaptation: A Multispecies Political Ecology of Late-Colonial Jamaica, 1870-1960, explores how Afro-Jamaican smallholders navigated a series of economic and ecological crises, particularly the banana-crop killing fungus known as Panama Disease. He uses the framework of multispecies political ecology to examine the spread of Panama Disease on the island and the ways that smallholders, planters, and colonial officials responded to the disease. His teaching interests include environmental history, Latin American and Caribbean history, world history, and environmental justice.

Lee Ann Custer, she/her(s), received her PhD and MA in history of art from the University of Pennsylvania, and her BA in history of art and architecture from Harvard University. As an art historian, she specializes in the art, architecture, and urbanism of the United States. Her concerns as a scholar and a teacher focus on the ways in which images mediate ideas of place and space in order to ask whose experiences they fortify and whose they omit. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and the New York Public Library, among others. Her current book project, Urban Air Modernism: Beyond the Skyscraper Aesthetic in New York, 1890–1940, studies the socio-spatial politics of urban air and its depiction in New York City. A second project considers the pedagogy and photography of city planner Denise Scott Brown in the mid-twentieth century.

Clara Wilch researches how environment and performance interrelate with a focus on philosophical and creative approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Her current book project illuminates the climatic influences of “icescapes,” performances that stage encounters between humans and ice, and centers modern and contemporary icescapes set in the Inuit co-governed territory of Nunavut, Canada. This project traces the creation of material/social infrastructures while attending to the intertwined histories of environmental change, colonialism, economics, and gender. She strives to interweave methods and insights from the humanities, arts, and sciences to help reconceive and advance environmental and multi-species justice. She holds a PhD in Theatre & Performance Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Other Faculty with Climate and Environmental Research

  • Hiba Baroud , Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineerin
  • Ashley Carse, Assistant Professor, Human and Organization Studies, Peabody College
  • Mark Cohen , Professor of American Competitive Enterprise & Professor of Law
  • Leah Dundon, Research Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineerin
  • Bruce Jennings , Adjunct Associate Professor in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society and the Department of Health Policy at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center
  • David Kosson , Co-Director of CRESP & Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
  • David Owens , Professor for the Practice of Management and Innovation
  • Craig Philip , Research Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director, Vanderbilt Center for Transportation and Operational Resilience (VECTOR)
  • Jim Rossi , Professor of Law and Director, Program in Law & Government
  • JB Ruhl , Director, Program on Law and Innovation and Professor of Law
  • Sarah Safransky, Assistant Professor of Human and Organizational Development, Peabody College
  • Ryan Trahan, Vanderbilt Law School
  • Michael Vandenbergh , Director of Climate Change Research Network & Professor of L
  • Carol Ziegler , Professor, School of Nursing