Christopher Low is appointed in the Department of History and is director of the Middle East Center. During his tenure as Environmental Humanities Research Professor, he will be working on his next book, tentatively titled The Well and the Water Machine: Desalination, Carbon Infrastructures, and Climate Risk in the Arabian Peninsula.
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.
Welcome to the Environmental Humanities Program! A letter from our incoming Director, Dr. Danielle Endres.
After nine years of leadership, Dr. Jeffrey McCarthy is officially retiring from his position as Director of the Environmental Humanities Program. Jeff assumed directorship of the Program in 2014. Since then, he has successfully graduated nearly 70 students and placed many of them in PhD programs, professional programs, non-profit leadership roles, and Fulbright program; created the Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities to celebrate environmental leadership and expression; organized two leadership symposia for regional Environmental Humanities academic leaders; encouraged vigorous relationships with U of U research organizations like Taft-Nicholson Center and Bonderman Field Station at Rio Mesa; hired new faculty members including Lizzie Callaway, Diana Leong and Angela Robinson; organized the Environmental Humanities Research Interest Group on campus; and most recently is the recipient of a Mellon Foundation grant that created an Environmental Humanities Community Fellows Program to promote environmental justice and all the while, published three books.
Professor Danielle Endres will officially be the new director of the Environmental Humanities Program! After many years as director, Jeffrey McCarthy is retiring from the position and his term will end in June. We are grateful for Jeff's years of commitment to the Program, and we look forward to a new chapter with Danielle as our next leader. Danielle has been an affiliated faculty member with our program since its beginning, so she brings both fresh eyes and a deep understanding of our history and evolution.