More participant bios coming soon…
Qianqian Cheng is a doctoral student at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and a member of the research team on Anglophone cultures (CAS). She received her M.A. from Xiamen University, China. Her thesis focuses on Loren Eiseley’s prose and poetry to show how he challenges the views of science, nature, and man held by most of his contemporaries, in particular in arguing against scientific specialization and urging the importance of including the humanities in conversations about science. Qianqian was awarded a three year grant from the China Scholarship Council to study in France in 2012. She got the travel award of AMID (Aide à la Mobilité Internaltionale des Doctorant(e)s from the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in 2014, which helped her visit Eiseley’s hometown, Lincoln, Nebraska, for the documentation of the thesis.
Elizabeth Curry received her B.A. in Biology from Illinois Wesleyan and her M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. Her research interests include ecocriticism, gender studies, modern and twentieth-century literature and culture, and animal studies. She is working on a dissertation that investigates architecture in modern literature, with an interest in how the structure of home perpetuates climate change and other environmental catastrophes. She has twice won UO’s annual Krohn Prize for essays on Literature and the Environment. She is also a co-organizer of a campus-wide Research Interest Group on human and animal studies.
Benedict Fullalove is Associate Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design. He holds a BA in History from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. His research focus is on the representational construction of place in western Canada. He has written and published on a variety of related topics, including 19th and 20th century narratives of travel in the Canadian Rockies; the history of map making in the Rockies; the relationship between colonial and indigenous place names and place making; and the shifting contexts of living history museums in British Columbia and Alberta. He worked for several years as a naturalist-interpreter in Jasper National Park, and has spent more than thirty years hiking, skiing, biking and climbing in the Canadian Rockies.
James R. Goebel is a fourth year graduate student in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on 20th century Anglo-, Hispano-, and Native American literatures of the Southwest American deserts; critical animal and environmental studies; and the history of biology, with particular interest in theorizations of “the organism.”
Oliver Völker studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature in Frankfurt and Fribourg (Switzerland) and received his MA from the Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2011. Since 2012 he has been working at the Department of Comparative Literature at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. He is currently writing a dissertation on the relationship between nature and catastrophes from Romanticism to contemporary literature. His research interests focus on the relationship between literature and nature, animal studies, and the theory of metaphor. His publications include, “Hang on to the words: The Scarcity of Language in McCarthy’s The Road and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” (2015), “Freeze this frame. Zeitlicher Stillstand in Lehrs 42 und McCarthys The Road” (2015), “Metaphors we die by: The Aesthetics of Nature in Lydia Millet´s How the Dead Dream” (2015), and “Che tempo, che tempo: Geology and Environment in Max Frisch´s Man in the Holocene” (forthcoming in On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture).
Companion Species in North American Cultural Productions 