EH Blog

Melissa Parks is a newly appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. She is also an Associate Director of the University’s Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Education in Centennial Valley, Montana. Grounded in the transdisciplinary area of Science, Health, Environmental, and Risk (SHER) Communication, her research employs rhetorical and pedagogical lenses to explore public engagement with advocacy and activism, particularly in contexts of environmental conservation. As a teacher-scholar and field educator, Melissa enjoys collaboratively and creatively designing and facilitating diverse, place-based educational programming in support of students, teachers, artists, and scientists.

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.

Madeline McGill is a political scientist and narrative strategist living in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the unceded lands of the Eastern Shoshone and Goshute peoples. As an organizer and strategist, she has worked with organized labor, candidates for office, and advocacy organizations across the country on building campaigns that are committed to storytelling and transformational organizing strategy. Madeline moved to Utah in 2019 to help found the Rural Utah Project, bringing their fundraising and communications programs online. Since, she has worked as a freelance organizer and consultant, building, learning, and dreaming across the Mountain West.