I am an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher working across the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. I write about energy imaginaries and Black and Indigenous environmental futures in the long emergencies of the present. I’m an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability at Allegheny College, on the ancestral homelands of the Erielhonan, Haudenosaunee, and Lenni Lenape peoples. I hold a PhD in English from The University of Texas at Austin.
About Me
I am a settler scholar raised on the unceded homelands of the səlil’wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations (also known as Vancouver, British Columbia). I hold a PhD in English from The University of Texas at Austin and my research and teaching focus on the intersections of energy, race, and environmental justice in contemporary US literature and culture. My essays, reviews, and public writing have appeared or are forthcoming in Sustainability, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice, The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, Modern Fiction Studies, The Global South, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies, and Environmental History Now. I am a member of the Common Worlds Research Collective, where I write and collaborate on topics related to feminist and anticolonial pedagogy and methodology. Prior to joining the Department of Environmental Science and Sustainability at Allegheny College, I served as a volunteer instructor with Inside Literature, where I studied fiction with incarcerated students in Del Valle, TX.
WRITING
I explore the relationship between energy infrastructures and contemporary art and storytelling, with a focus on the entanglements of media, race, and environmental justice in extractive zones. With an investment in public environmental humanities, my writing engages both academic and public-facing spaces. See below for selections of recent publications.
MONOGRAPH IN-PROGRESS
My current book project, Refining America: Energy, Infrastructure, and the Arts of Resistance in the US Gulf Coast, argues that media from extractive capitals evince vital strategies for thinking with, through, and beyond the carbon-constrained world. I draw from a broad media landscape of popular genres and forms, including digital storytelling, viral media, detective novels, television, and photography, to understand how authors remediate the everyday infrastructures of oil—from petrochemical plants to offshore rigs—to imagine more just environmental futures. Some of the writers, artists, and mediamakers I explore include mystery writer Attica Locke, landscape photographer Richard Misrach, climate-change cartographer Kate Orff, documentarian Brenda Longfellow, and speculative fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer. This project ultimately works to understand how the everyday infrastructures that extract, refine, and distribute energy across the Gulf Coast animate cultural imaginations and reveal new entanglements of media, history, bodies, and environment.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
“Ecocriticism: From the Wilderness Idea to Just Multispecies Futures” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice (Nov 2023)
“Undisciplining Environmental Communication Pedagogy: Toward Environmental and Epistemic Justice in the Interdisciplinary Sustainability Classroom” in Sustainability (Jan 2023)
“Ecocriticism and the Body” in The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body (June 2022)
“Sensing the Anthropocene in Louie Palu’s Melting Arctic” in NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment (Dec. 2021)
“Digital Deepwater Imaginaries in Brenda Longfellow’s Offshore” in Modern Fiction Studies (Spring 2020)
“Sustainability Without Race? Disrupting Whiteness at the Introductory Level” in AASHE Anthology on Racial Equity and Social Justice (Oct. 2021)
“Touring Tough Oil: A Reflection on the Infrastructure of Offshore Energy” in Environmental History Now (Jul. 2019)
“Plantation Pasts and the Petrochemical Present: Energy Culture, the Gulf Coast, and Petrochemical America,” in Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies (LSU Press, 2019)
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, by Cleo Wölfle Hazard. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2023.
Review of The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty: Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and Society, by Franklin Obeng-Odoom. The Global South, vol. 15, no. 1, 2022
Review of Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, by Jessica Hurley. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021.
Review of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, by Nicole Seymour. The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, vol. 17, no. 2, article 11, 2019
Review of Energy Humanities: An Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer. E3W Review of Books, Spring 2018, pp. 33-34.
Review of Universes Without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature, by Matthew A. Taylor. E3W Review of Books, Spring 2015, pp. 34-35.
TEACHING
My praxis as an educator is deeply shaped by my investment in social justice. At Allegheny College, I teach courses on environmental cultures and environmental justice, with a focus on Black and Indigenous world-making and grassroots activism. I’m committed to the role of arts and education (academic and beyond-academic) in the fight for climate justice and anti-racist action.
CONTACT
Email: dbyrnes@allegheny.edu
Department of Environmental Science and Sustainability
Carr Hall, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA 16335
Twitter: @deliabyrnes
Delia Byrnes, Ph.D. 