Thomas S. Davis is Associate Professor of English and co-coordinator of Environmental Humanities 
and the Cultures of the Anthropocene Working Group. He specializes in modern and contemporary literature and culture, environmental humanities, and aesthetic theory. He is the author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life(Columbia University Press, 2016) and is currently at work on two book projects: The Cultural Lives of Climate Change and Fossils of Tomorrow: The Literature and Culture of the Great Acceleration(see personal page for more details). His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Twentieth Century Literature, Textual Practice, Literature Compass, English Language Notes,Antipode, Modernism/Modernity, and several edited collections.
Chris Otter is Associate Professor of History and co-coordinator of the Environmental Humanities.He is a spe
cialist in modern British history, with particular focus on the history of science, technology and public health, environmental history and the history of food. His first book,The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008. He has published articles in numerous journals, including the Journal of British Studies, Cultural Geographies, Food and History, and History of Technology.
He is currently writing The Vital State: Food Systems, Nutrition Transitions, and the Making of Industrial Britain. This book is global in focus, and explores the causes, consequences, and experience of a shift to a diet rich in animal protein, wheat, sugar and dairy products. Professor Otter is also working on a longer-term, transnational project on the emergence of “technological society” since the seventeenth century, which encompasses the history of human health, ecology and security.
Professor Otter has received numerous awards and honours. The Victorian Eye received the 2009 Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association and the 2008 Sonia Rudikoff Prize from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. He received the 2010 Paul W. Brown Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching in the Departments of English and History, and he has been the recipient of several fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Mary Thomas is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and co-coordinator of the Environmental Humanities and the Cultures of the Anthropocene Working Group. She studies extraction cultures in the Bakken region of North Dakota, especially the emerging urban formations of heteropatriarchies and settler colonialism in Williston. Along with her collaborators, she is writing on the geoaesthetics of the Bakken boom and fracking.
She also studies contemporary girlhood in the United States. Her 2011 book, Multicultural Girlhood, examines racial-ethnic segregation among Latino and Armenian girls at a high school in Los Angeles. The book contributes a feminist and psychoanalytic viewpoint on the conservative racial and sexual practices of American girlhood in scholarship that has been more likely to emphasize girls’ heroic agency. Her current research explores girls’ peer relationships in an Ohio juvenile detention facility.
She is interested in bringing a geographic lens to the lives of young women, and has written about urban, home, and school spaces – and now, prison spaces – to do so.
Tessa Jacobs is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English with a specialization in folklore 
and the graduate administrative assistant for Environmental Humanities. Her research interests include family folklore, counter-cultural performance and festival in California, and the intersections of environmental humanities and folklore studies. Her current research explores the cultural dimensions of drought and fire in Southern California. She holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture from Scripps College, and a M.A. in English from Ohio State University.