Prof. Dr. Nicole Seymour

As an environmental humanist, Nicole Seymour pursues two lines of inquiry: the intersection of LGBTQ+ politics and environmental politics, and the role of emotions in environmental art, activism, and discourse. Her first book, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press), won the 2015 Book Award for Ecocriticism from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Her most recent, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press), was included in the Chicago Review of Books’ list of the “Best Nature Writing of 2018.” Dr. Seymour developed the latter project during a 2013-14 fellowship at the Carson Center, and subsequently served on the executive committee of the Center’s Society of Fellows. She is also a co-curator of NXTerra, an open-access repository of climate pedagogy materials developed by faculty across the University of California and California State University systems. Her other current projects concern climate fiction or “cli-fi,” contemporary Indigenous literature, and the role of humor in pedagogy. Dr. Seymour is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, where she also serves as the Graduate Advisor for the Environmental Studies Program.

RCC Research Project: Object Lessons: Glitter

Selected Publications:

• with undergraduate student Briggetta Pierrot. “Contemporary Cli-Fi and Indigenous Futurisms.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research’s special issue on “Composing Climate Change: Atmosphere, Affect, Attention.” Forthcoming in 2020.

• “Queer Ecologies and Queer Environmentalisms.” Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies. Edited by Siobhan Somerville. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

• Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

• “Middlesex and the Biopolitics of Modernist Architecture.” The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada 17, no. 1 (2018).

• “Men and Nature: Hegemonic Masculinities and Environmental Change.” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, no. 4 (2017). Journal issue co-edited with Sherilyn MacGregor.

• Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. University of Illinois Press, 2013.