Alumni Spotlight: Zak Breckenridge

Zak Breckenridge is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern California and is a 2024 Wrigley Institute Fellow. After growing up in the Adirondacks in New York, and living in Chicago, Austria, and Salt Lake City, he now lives in Long Beach, California. His research interests include ecocriticism, documentary film, the history of science, and the history of materialist thought. His writing has previously appeared or is forthcoming in the Salt Lake Tribune, The Common, SFRA Review, and Western American Literature, among other venues. Outside of the library and the classroom, he likes to go hiking and watch old movies.

Below are Zak’s written responses to questions about his doctoral program, his research in Environmental Humanities, and the role of literature in the climate crisis. 

Tell us a bit about your background. How did you come to enter USC’s doctoral program in English?

I went to a small liberal arts college called Simon’s Rock, which is in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. I studied literature, creative writing, and philosophy there. I didn’t approach my education in a particularly professional way, but I liked language and ideas. It was a school that encouraged eclecticism and independent thought, and the professors gave us a lot of individual support. From there, I did a one-year masters program in “Humanities” at the University of Chicago. That program allowed for some eclecticism as well, but Chicago is a serious place and I learned the importance of developing a professional “brand” in academia. People always ask what your project is, and as you get deeper into academia the answer gets narrower and narrower. I became interested in ghosts and gothic literature, and wrote a thesis about haunting in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

I spent some time outside the academy, working in an office in Chicago and then teaching English in Austria. I came to the Environmental Humanities program at Utah almost by chance in 2017. I had started to read some environmental history and nature writing. I knew I wanted to keep going to graduate school, but I wasn’t sure what field I should go into. I found the program on Google, and it was the only program I applied to that year. Something I liked about the EH program was the range of interests and expertise that my peers had. At that time, almost everyone had a background in literature to some extent, though I was the only one whose research focused on fiction. I was able to take a few really good classes in the English department. I ended up writing a thesis about landscape and emotion in Joan Didion’s and Wallace Stegner’s California novels. The focus of my research has shifted, but it continues to be informed by what I learned about the literature of the American West and the history of environmental movements at the University of Utah. And I’m still writing about Stegner, though from a somewhat different angle.

By the time I was applying to doctoral programs, I was presenting myself as an ecocritic focused on the twentieth-century United States. I was accepted to two programs, and chose USC mostly because the funding was better. I started in the fall of 2020, when so many of us were staying home, and my classes were all held online.

How does your research engage with the environmental humanities?

Somewhat to my surprise, my research now is not just in the environmental humanities, but is increasingly about the environmental humanities. My dissertation project is a re-assessment of some classic eco-writers by placing them in literary, scientific, and institutional context. Consider, for instance, Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring exposed the catastrophic effects of pesticides on humans and ecologies. She is such an influential writer and her life, because she wrote a book that tangibly impacted our world and died quite soon after, lends itself to a kind of heroic narrative of moral purity and martyrdom. Even now, much of the commentary about her is wrangling over whether she was a saint or not. My approach is to look at the trilogy of ocean books that she wrote before Silent Spring. By creating some distance from the received narratives about her life and work, I hope to think about how she was using what she knew about literature and about marine biology to make sense of the world. This approach also places her not on a mythic pedestal, but back in the context of the Fish and Wildlife Service, where she worked while composing the first two works in the trilogy. Her books were so impactful in part because she was in touch with so many government and academic scientists, and she could synthesize and interpret cutting-edge research about the ocean.

I’ve come to believe that Carson and other mid-century environmentalist writers were trying to start something like the environmental humanities, but the time was not ripe yet. By environmental humanities, I mean an intellectual space where the tools of science and art could co-habit in a time of increasing specialization in the academy. Now, many inside and outside the academy are recognizing the necessity of working across the humanities and the sciences to respond to accelerating global ecological catastrophe, and I think that mid-century environmentalists were really ahead of the curve on this. The authors I study were paying attention to the science, to the signs of environmental collapse, and to the practical work of preservation and reform. But they were writers, and I think that figurative language and narrative form were key to their responses. I want to provide a firmer basis for the idea that the response to environmental crisis must be cultural as well as technical. It’s not that Rachel Carson has the solutions to the crises we face now. But I hope that, by turning to this earlier moment of contact between scientific and humanistic ways of knowing the world, we can give a clearer account of what the environmental humanities are and should be. They can’t be just activist and aspirational—they have to be substantively interdisciplinary. And “the literary,” in Carson and other environmentalist writers, is the place where different ways of knowing the world get negotiated.

What is the place of literature within the environmental humanities, as you see it?

I may be biased because of my field and my background, but I think literature is really central to the environmental humanities as an intellectual project. Literature programs are among the few havens for interdisciplinary thought in the radically siloed academic world. Doctorates in literary studies can take a long time in part because, in addition to our specialization in some period or genre of literature, we are often cross-training in two or three other fields, whether it’s biology or economics or psychology. It may be that graduate programs in literature attract eclectic thinkers and writers, but I also think there’s something fundamentally interdisciplinary about literature. Fiction and poetry always have one foot in the concrete and the one foot in the abstract. As Wallace Stegner once wrote, fiction should be built from “concrete things” such as “the hard knotting of anger in the solar plexus, the hollowness of a night street, the sound of poplar leaves.” And yet, those concrete things should be organized in a way that has conceptual resonance. This lets authors play with ideas without committing themselves to definite positions in the way that, say, philosophers do. I know that I entered college interested in philosophy, but I’ve ended up in a literature department because I found the protocols of academic philosophy too restrictive. We still get to explore big questions in creative ways because that’s what literature does.

The climate crisis, of course, confronts us with problems that are technical and scientific. But it also entails problems that are imaginative and representational. It’s not enough to gather the data and build the devices. We need ways of understanding the crisis that mediate between the human scales of our experience and the vast, inhuman scales of geological time. I think that literature, and the study of literature, is one of the places to incubate the flexibility of mind that we need now. So I support work in the environmental humanities of whatever kind; I think it’s vital. But there is something about the conceptual density of literary writing, as well as its connection to so many realms of human experience and knowledge, that I think suits it particularly well for the kind of inventive, ambitious thinking that the climate crisis calls on us to perform.