Rina Garcia Chua:
Dr. Rina Garcia Chua is a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University and she completed her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is the editor of the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry, Sustaining the Archipelago, which was published with the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2018 and is co-editor of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific, forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press in October 24, 2022. Rina is also the co-diversity officer for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), poetry editor of Tiger Moth Review in Singapore, and co- editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.
Melody Griffin Dowdy:
Melody Griffin Dowdy is a Metis woman residing on Treaty 7 traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Tsuut’ina First Nation, Stoney Nakoda, and Metis Nation Region III (Calgary). She is pursuing at MA in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include climate change and women’s reproductive rights. She is also a mental health advocate and writer and lover of fiction in all its forms. She edits fiction at filling station and Lida Lit. She is currently working on her first novel.
Marc André Fortin:
Marc André Fortin is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Canadian Literature at l’Université de Sherbrooke in Québec, Canada. His publications include research on Indigenous literatures, Postcolonial literatures, ecocriticism, and science and literature in collections and journals such as Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (Oxford UP); Learn, Teach, Challenge: Indigenous Literatures in the 21st Century (Wilfred Laurier UP); Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media (Toronto UP); Studies in Canadian Literature; English Studies in Canada; and Configurations. He is currently Member-at-Large for the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada.
Greg Garrard:
Greg Garrard is Professor of Environmental Humanities and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge, 3rd edn. forthcoming), the editor of Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (Palgrave 2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (OUP 2014), and series co-editor of Environmental Cultures from Bloomsbury Academic. His research, ranging from environmental fiction to animal studies, ecopedagogy and ecocritical literary theory, has been published in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, ISLE, Contemporary Literature, Configurations, WiRES Climate Change and numerous edited collections. He co-authored Climate Change Skepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis (Bloomsbury Academic 2019), with Axel Goodbody, George B. Handley and Stephanie Posthumus. He is presently working on a SSHRC-funded research project: ‘Kelownafornia: Cultures of Nature in the Okanagan Valley’. Much of his published research can viewed at https://universityofbritishcolumbia.academia.edu/GregGarrard
Rachel W. Jekanowski:
Rachel Webb Jekanowski is an interdisciplinary scholar working between film and media studies and the energy humanities. She earned her PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University and works as an Assistant Professor of English at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus in Newfoundland and Labrador. Her scholarly practice is deeply informed by relationships to place and a commitment to social justice. Rachel’s current book project, Cinemas of Extraction: Land, Resources, Settler Imaginaries, examines environmental and colonial entanglements of twentieth-century nontheatrical and documentary filmmaking in North America. Follow her on Twitter @stalebreadzine and find out more about her work at https://rjekanowski.ca.
Amy LeBlanc:
Amy LeBlanc is a PhD student in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. Amy’s debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know, was published with Gordon Hill Press in March 2020 and was long listed for the 2021 ReLit Award and selected as a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Her novella, Unlocking, was published by the UCalgary Press in June 2021 and is a finalist for the Trade Fiction Book of the Year through the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Room, Arc, Canadian Literature, and the Literary Review of Canada among others. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry— most recently, “Undead Juliet at the Museum,” which was published with ZED Press in August 2021. Amy is a recipient of the 2020 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and a CGS-D Award for her doctoral research into fictional representations of chronic illness and gothic spaces; she is also a Killam Laureate. Follow Amy on Twitter @amylia_leblanc.
Cheryl Lousley:
Cheryl Lousley is an Associate Professor cross-appointed between English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University Orillia, which is situated near Mnjikaning, a thousands-of-years-old gathering place for the Anishinaabeg and other peoples. She researches global and Canadian environmental justice and politics as manifest, imagined, and contested in contemporary Canadian, Indigenous, and postcolonial literatures as well as various other cultural and political texts. She is looking forward to publishing her first book, Promised World, Earthly Hearings: Liberal Internationalism, Fugitive Democracy, and Sustainable Development. Her essays appear in Studies in Canadian Literature, Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry,The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate, Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context, Globalizations, Environmental Communication, Resilience, Topia, Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, and Popular Representations of Development, among other places. She has been a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich; an IASH fellow at the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network; and a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the founding series editor for the Environmental Humanities book series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press since 2007.
Cheryl Lousley was at the founding meeting of ALECC in 2006, helped organize the Lakehead and University of Saskatchewan ALECC conferences, and served on the executive council as a member-at-large and as president. She is committed to ALECC as a forum for Canadian discussions of the environmental arts and humanities, as a supportive community where graduate students have been the leaders, and as an organization that addresses the intersections of injustice and inequality with lived and imagined environments.
Jessica McDonald:
Jessica McDonald is a Sessional Instructor at the University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches introductory courses in English literature and Indigenous, Canadian, and Decolonizing Literatures. She researches the literatures of Canada in relation to social and environmental justice, and she has published on Nalo Hopkinson, Michael Crummey, and Douglas Coupland. Most recently, her research studies the social, spatial, and environmental politics of so-called “non-places,” like Walmart, as represented in literature and culture. She is a community-engaged scholar activist and the host of the scholarly podcast Teachin’ Books, all about the ways people teach, learn, and work with literature.
Joshua Schuster:
Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English at Western University. He is author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2015). He has co-written with Derek Woods the book Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Recent essays have appeared in the journals Resilience, Cultural Review Studies, Parrhesia, and in edited volumes on Derrida, Roberto Esposito, and contemporary ecopoetics. He is currently finishing a book on the conceptual and cultural meanings of extinction titled What Is Extinction? (Fordham UP, 2023). He is also in the early stages of a new book project on contemporary ecopoetics and the necessity of developing extreme forms of poetic address. Joshua was the Treasurer and an Executive member of ALECC.
Conrad Scott:
Conrad Scott holds a PhD from and is an Instructor in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, on Treaty 6 / Métis lands. He is also an Individualized Study Tutor for the University of Athabasca’s new “The Ecological Imagination” course, and is honoured to serve as the Science Fiction Research Association’s current Country Rep for Canada. He researches SF and environmental literature, and his current project builds on a study of the interconnection between place, culture, and society in contemporary North American fiction that focuses on environment and dystopia/utopia. His academic writing has appeared in Transmotion, Extrapolation, Paradoxa, The Anthropocene and the Undead, Environmental Philosophy, The Goose, UnderCurrents, Science Fiction Studies, The SFRA Review, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and Canadian Literature. He is also the author of the poetry collection Waterline Immersion (Frontenac House 2019).
prOphecy sun:
prOphecy sun (PhD) is an interdisciplinary performance artist, queer, movement, video, sound maker, and mother of three. Her practice celebrates both conscious and unconscious moments and the vulnerable spaces of the in-between in which art, performance, and life overlap. Her recent research has focused on ecofeminist perspectives, co-composing with voice, objects, surveillance technologies, and site-specific engagements along the Columbia Basin region and beyond. She is the Arts Editor for Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities and a sessional faculty member at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She performs and exhibits regularly in local, national, and international settings, music festivals, conferences, and galleries and has authored several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and journal publications on sound design, installation, performance, and domestic spheres. https://prophecysun.com
Lisa Szabo-Jones:
Lisa Szabo-Jones, a photographer, writer, walker, scholar, and educator, grew up by the Salish Sea. She co-founded (2005) and is past co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. She is a co-editor of the collections Activating the Heart and Sustaining the West and of an ARIEL special issue, Postcolonial Ecocriticism among Settler-Colonial Nations. She is published in Canadian Literature, ISLE, Alternatives Journal, ESC, HA&L, Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times, and Greening the Maple and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy. She currently teaches literature at a CÉGEP near Montreal.
Leah Van Dyk:
Leah Van Dyk (she/her) is a doctoral candidate and Killam Laureate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She gratefully researches and studies as a settler on the traditional territory of Treaty 7, with her primary research interests located around the environmental humanities and radical revisionings of being in community—both pedagogically and practically—as a model of literary practice. She has recent or forthcoming publications in English Studies in Canada, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, is passionate about community projects, and is overly fond of tea. Leah served as the Secretary, Social Media Manager, and an Executive member of ALECC from 2020-2022. Follow Leah on Twitter @leahvandyk.
PREVIOUS ALECC PRESIDENTS
Jennifer Schell, English, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Glenn Wilmott Department of English, Queen’s University
Cheryl Lousley English and Interdisciplinary Studies, Lakehead University
Brett Buchanan School of the Environment, Laurentian University
Norah Bowman Interdisciplinary Studies, Okanagan College
Jenny Kerber English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University
Astrida Neimanis Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia
Jodey Castricano Department of Critical Studies, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Keri Cronin Department of Visual Arts, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario.
Robert Boschman Department of English, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta.
Cate Sandilands Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Ontario.
Richard Pickard Department of English, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia.
Pamela Banting Department of English, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta.