Faculty

Mark Bergstrom, Professor, Communication is an accomplished scholar and award-winning teacher in the Department of Communication; he has extensive administrative experience here at the U, he served 11 years as Senior Associate Dean as well as Acting and Interim Dean in the College of Humanities.  

Mark was the founding Director of the Environmental Humanities Master’s Degree program, and was actively involved in the University’s acquisition of the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Education Center. He knows and understands the Center and has watched its growth and development from the earliest stages; he is a passionate environmentalist who has a deep understanding of the landscape of the American West and Montana.

I am at present an Emeritus Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty member of the American West Center. Throughout my career at the University of Utah my teaching and research has specialized in interdisciplinary literary and cultural American studies, with a particular focus on critical regionalism of the American West, American popular culture, and the environmental humanities. I am the author and editor of several books, the most recent being the July 2024 publication of Unhomely Wests: Essays from A to Z, in the Postwestern Horizons series at the University of Nebraska Press. All my teams wear red: the Utah Utes, the St Louis Cardinals, and the Arsenal Gunners of the English Premier League. 

A thing I am proud of as EH Director:  Working successfully with both the College of Humanities Dean (Robert Newman) and Associate Dean (Mark Bergstrom) and my faculty colleagues to establish a more secure foundation for EH graduate program. During my tenure as EH Director we collectively were able to increase the financial support for a larger number of EH students; were able to move into our own quarters at a historic Fort Douglas building; and began establishing a footprint in Montana’s Centennial Valley for an Environmental Humanities Center. In addition, I served as co-chair of faculty recruitment committees for both a new joint faculty position with the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and a new position for a full-time EH Director after I completed my term.

My scholarship has focused on the cultural uses of nature. I am author or editor of four books – Contact: Mountain Climbing and environmental Thinking; Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel; Conrad and Nature; and The Anthropocene Ocean. Academic writing sits alongside more popular venues for distributing ideas and I have long penned op-eds, done media interviews, and written articles for national mountain climbing and ocean sailing magazines. The point is to share the knowledge. My teaching has focused on empowering students to examine the ideas that matter to them while giving them tools to make their examinations meaningful. Before joining the University of Utah, I was the founding Director of the Environmental Studies major at Westminster College. At the moment I live on a sailboat and explore ocean health from the precarious viewpoint of my rocking deck.

Proud Achievements

The EH program has been on quite a ride!

Leadership begins and ends with people. The Dean and previous directors pointed EH towards success. I worked closely with faculty from across the university to imagine the world’s best environmental humanities education; then I set to work making it happen.

We recruited great students from diverse backgrounds and worked to fund them all. We spent a decade raising our national profile by building on past successes and by embracing ambitious initiatives like:

• Creating the Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities to honor luminaries like Rebecca Solnit and Amitav Ghosh
• Hosting national symposia on The Future of the Environmental Humanities
• Funding summer research grants for EH students
• Focusing our curriculum towards environmental justice
• Building durable connections with community partners
• Winning major national grants

Our community of scholars and activists enacted these interventions at a critical moment for America’s environmental story. Our momentum was recognized by two significant grants from the Mellon Foundation that have allowed EH to intensify its dedication to environmental justice work and its pledge to support students at the interstices of scholarship and activism.

No part of this was easy. Real work takes real work. But bright minds came together to engage pressing environmental problems with powerful humanities tools. There’s a lot for all of us to be proud of looking back, and there’s even more for us to do looking forward.

EH Interim Director from July 2020-June 2021

Katharina Gerstenberger, PhD 1993 at Cornell University, is professor of German in the Department of World Languages & Cultures at the University of Utah. She is the author of Truth to Tell: German Women’s Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (2000) and Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature (2008). She co-edited German Literature in a New Century: Trends, Traditions, Transformations, Transitions (2008); After the Berlin Wall: Germany and Beyond (2011); and Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond (2015). Her articles on topics of 20th and 21st German literary culture and questions of Environmental Humanities have appeared in Ecozon@, Gegenwartsliteratur, Monatshefte, Women in German Yearbook, German Studies Review, German Politics and Society, German Quarterly, Telos, German Life and Letters, and in several anthologies, including German Literature in the Age of Globalization (2004), Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture (2010), Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture (2010), and German-Speaking Nature Writing from the Eighteenth Century to the Present: Controversies, Positions, Perspectives (2024). From 2007-2010 she was co-editor of Women in German Yearbook. She currently serves as editor of German Studies Review. Gerstenberger is completing a monograph on artistic responses to nuclear disasters across historical and cultural contexts, tentatively titled “Disturbed Places and Troubled Times: The Nuclear Narratives of Bikini Atoll, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.” 

Proud Achievements

1. My term as interim director took place during the COVID pandemic. I believe that I succeeded in steering the program through this challenging time, supporting students and colleagues as we all tried to negotiate unprecedented circumstances.
2. I implemented the Mellon Foundation grant program director Jeff McCarthy had secured the previous year, including hiring the first Community Engagement and Outreach Coordinator, selecting the first Practitioner-in-Residence, and welcoming the first two Mellon Graduate Fellowship recipients.
3. With the help of colleagues, I laid the groundwork for the Environmental Humanities and Transformative Justice Undergraduate Certificate that began enrolling students F24.