EH Blog

Taylor Brorby is the current Annie Clark Annie Clark Tanner Teaching & Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities. He is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Celebrate Pride Week by joining Taylor Brorby, Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities for a reading and discussion of his memoir, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, on March 29 at 4p in the Jewel Box (CTIHB 145). Refreshments provided.

Tessa has worked in the field of environmental education with organizations such as Summit Land Conservancy and Conserve Utah Valley to help spread awareness and appreciation for the natural world. Tessa’s research in the Environmental Humanities focuses on environmental education as a method of fostering resiliency and connection in the face of climate change. Tessa’s thesis work combines accessible, digital education and experiential learning methods to encourage emotional resiliency and place-based sensory connection as a way to understand and confront eco-anxiety and climate grief.

Chris Ingraham is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and on the core faculty of the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah. His work as an active teacher and researcher is in the areas of media aesthetics, environmental communication, and rhetorical theory. Generally, he tries to draw on the insights of these fields to think about the material, aesthetic, and affective practices that configure the environments we create and inhabit. Before becoming an academic, he worked for several years as a freelance writer. Though the arts remain central to his interests, his academic training across the humanities commits him to cross-disciplinary thinking with the belief that we should bring all available knowledge to the problems we're trying to understand.

Ayja Bounous grew up at the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, where the rhythmic pulse of the seasons was as much a part of life as breathing. It was not until her adult years, however, that she realized how her whole world revolved around Wasatch snow—from the places she loved, to the activities that she enjoyed doing, to the relationships in her life. She earned a Master's of Arts in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah in 2017, and went on to publish her master’s thesis, Shaped by Snow: Defending the Future of Winter, with Torrey House Press in 2019.