Juliana Chow: 2025-2027 EH Research Professor

Dr. Juliana Chow is an Assistant Professor (lecturer) in the University of Utah Honors College. Provided below are the written answers to questions posed by Danielle Endres, Director of Environmental Humanities during September 2025. Learn more about the Environmental Humanities Research Professorship on our faculty page. 

Congratulations on being the EH Research Professor! Your project, titled "Middle West," is a series of creative non-fiction essays. Tell us more about this project.  
I began this project after leaving my first job in academia as a professor of nineteenth-century American literature. I moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Beaverton, Oregon, and the echo of Lewis and Clark traveling from Missouri to Oregon struck me when I saw their names on maps and signs for parks and trails. They had traveled west in the name of "exploration"—advancing US settler colonialism and all that entails—and I, too, had moved West but this move was fraught with the difficulties of being a woman, a mother, a former academic, and closer to home while still too far away from a home where I, as a second-generation Chinese American woman, had not felt like a minority. It is still striking to me how lonely it is to be in the American West. 
    As I was struggling with being a full-time mom during the pandemic and also wondering if I was somehow a failure for leaving a career, I started writing letters to a friend from graduate school about what Oregon was like and about trying to start a garden where I lived. Growing things and paying attention to what was growing around me was a way to understand the place where I had found myself. I've been inspired by works like Jamaica Kincaid's My Garden (Book), Camille Dungy's Soil, and Jessica J. Lee's Dispersals, which track the diasporic movement of plants and people and the diasporic cultivation of home (oikos) in displacement. 
"Middle West" began with those letters and then became a long essay about not-following the Lewis and Clark trail. As I expand this into a series of essays, I'd like to use the time given to me by the EH professorship to do some research and writing to help me think about diasporic gardening/homemaking and motherhood. 

What brought you to the field of environmental humanities? And, what inspired you to want to be involved in the Environmental Humanities Program at the U?  
In my previous work as an academic, I researched how nineteenth-century writers and thinkers engaged with biogeography to theorize the diasporic survival of species and races. I've always been interested in how "nature" has been understood, but I haven't always felt like I understood why this mattered to me. My first job out of college was as a communications manager for a small environmental science non-profit, but I wasn't making enough money to move out of my parents' house. I ended up pursuing a literature PhD and then ended up studying nineteenth-century America. Didn't Maxine Hong Kingston cite Whitman after all? And why is Thoreau so appealing to me? Nineteenth-century America was the period when "wilderness" and many accompanying ideas from the picturesque to the sublime, from the frontier to the plantation, were part of the discourse of nature. Biogeography was just another approach among and related to many from that period. But why should I keep researching this? It took me years to figure out what my academic book might be about. 
    I think I left academia because I couldn't find myself in that place, and I came back to environmental humanities because it's where I hope to find myself. I remember being at a workshop where another Chinese American nineteenth-century Americanist said she wanted to find a Chinese woman in the archive to study. Our workshop leader just said, “Well, you can't make something that isn't in the archive appear out of nowhere.” There are, of course, Chinese women in the nineteenth-century American archive, but there's not a ton of material to work with—a few photographs, newspaper articles, historical documents, etc. The closest you get to a Chinese American woman author in that period is the half-Chinese Eaton sisters: Edith Maude Eaton, who wrote under the pseudonym "Siu Sin Far" and Winnifred Eaton, who wrote as "Onoto Watanna." If you're looking for an early Asian American nature writer...well, good luck. But I can't help it, I'm still looking for my intellectual and spiritual forebears.  
   Leaving academia made me grateful for the mentors I had during my first job and EH is a place where I have found a welcoming and kind community. While I'm here, I hope I can help cultivate this as much as possible. 
     
You teach environmental humanities courses in the Honors College. What are some of the key lessons you want your students to learn in your classes? The Mellon Foundation funds the EH program to expanding our focus on environmental justice, Indigenous knowledges, and community engagement. How do you see your creative scholarship and teaching intersecting with one or more of these pillars? 
 
The Honors College curriculum is built around courses called "Intellectual Traditions" to develop skills in critical thinking and writing. In my environmental humanities courses, I introduce students to how we've thought about nature as wilderness or nature as a garden by looking at American, Indigenous, and diasporic approaches. For example, one of my courses last year was organized around the legacy of slavery and the plantation system in how we think about gardens and agriculture, inspired in large part by the work of Kincaid and McKittrick. I want my students to also apply and practice their critical analysis in the landscapes around them, so, in the case of the garden class, we spent time working in the campus edible gardens to reflect on and compare and contrast the community garden with the plantation. To me, critical and reflective thinking can be practiced as a kind of ecological thinking. How do we care about and relate to what is before us, around us? Care and relation are at the core of community engagement, and practicing care and relation is how I see my creative scholarship and teaching intersecting the most with the pillars of EH. Lately, I've also become more intentional about developing "practice" as part of my teaching and asking my students to engage in "practice" as part of their work. Iterative, long-term work seems necessary to me to feel rooted/routed to the place where I am, so if there is anything that I hope students take away from class, it is simply that they leave with a partially developed practice in ecological thinking.  
 
Outside of work, how do you like to spend your time?  
I spend most of my time outside of work with my family, and then with the bits of time leftover, what do I do? I'm still trying to learn how to garden in Utah; so far, I've battled (mostly with myself) over how to deal with English ivy, Virginia creeper, and trumpet vine, and I've decided that some vegetables might just be too hard, and it's much easier to grow perennials and natives. I like finding plants that have seeded themselves in new places--like the globe mallow that reappeared after disappearing for two years, the prairie coneflowers, lavender, and California poppies. This year, I've been very lucky with tomatoes and endlessly slow-roasting batches of them in the oven. I'm currently reading Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, which I found at the local little free library; and watching Severance.

What advice would you give to our undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in creative nonfiction as a way to communicate about environmental/ecological pasts, presents, and futures?  
Carve out time for a writing practice. And help build a writing community where you can share work or just write in the same space together. I'm still struggling to do both of those things! 

Photo Credits: Juliana Chow