Prof. Dr. Koy Ursula M.

Ursula M. Koy is associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Oslo and founding director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH). Her research brings together approaches from multispecies studies, political ecology, feminist STS, and environmental anthropology to explore more-than-human relationships in the Anthropocene. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in South India, her work examines the coexistence of people and wildlife at the forest frontier and investigates how colonial histories, forest governance, and resource extraction continue to shape more-than-human worlds. Her research on interspecies conflict and care contributes to contemporary debates on conservation and the possibilities of coexistence in anthropogenic environments. Since August 2022, she has led the large interdisciplinary research project Anthropogenic SOILS, funded by the Research Council of Norway until 2028. Bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences, arts, and natural sciences, the project investigates how human activities transform soils in different parts of the world and explores possibilities for ecological repair and more livable multispecies futures.

RCC Project: Anthropogenic SOILS: Recuperating Human–Soil Relations in the Anthropocene

Selected Publications:

Publications prior to 2025 published as Ursula M. Münster.

• with Suma T. R. “Soilscapes: Making and Unmaking Below-Ground Worlds with Earthworms.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (2025, forthcoming).
• with Suma T. R. “Becoming Elephant: The Relational Personalities of Arikomban, Kalloor Komban, and Soorya in South India.” In Humanimalia 16, no. 1 (2025): 205–56. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.23831.
• with Thom van Dooren, Sara Asu Schroer, and Hugo Reinert. “Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction.” Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 26 January 2021. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/series/multispecies-care-in-the-sixth-extinction.
• with Thom van Dooren and Eben Kirksey. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 2 (2016): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695.
• “Lantana Invades Teak Plantations and Turns Elephants Violent.” In Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zou. Stanford University Press, 2016.
• “Working for the Forest: The Ambivalent Intimacies of Human–Elephant Collaboration in South Indian Wildlife Conservation.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81, no. 3 (2016): 425–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.969292.