Co-sponsored by the UCLA Canadian Studies Program.

Hannes Bergthaller teaches at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan, and is currently an Alexander-von-Humboldt research fellow at the University of Würzburg, Germany, where he is working on a book about ecological biopolitics and liberalism in the US. He is a founding member and immediate past president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLCE), and book review editor for the journal Ecozon@. His research interests are focused on US environmentalism and environmental philosophy. Among his recent publications are a guest-edited theme section on ecocriticism and comparative literature in Komparatistik (2014) and the edited volume Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and US Cultures (together with Carsten Schinko, 2011).

Greg Garrard (Literary Studies, University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus) is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2004; second edition, 2011), which is the most widely used introduction to the field and has been translated into Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, and—in an unofficial Taiwanese edition—Mandarin Chinese. Garrard has written numerous essays on eco-pedagogy, animal studies, and environmental criticism, and has recently edited Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (Palgrave, 2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (OUP, 2014), the biggest single-volume collection yet published in the field. With John Parham, he co-edits the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. Garrard is also a founding member and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK & Ireland).

Catriona Sandilands (Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto) teaches and writes across queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory, and the environmental humanities; she is currently President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and was a founder and Past President of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada / L’Association pour la littérature, l’environnement et la culture au Canada. She is the co-editor (with Bruce Erickson) of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Indiana, 2010), the co-editor (with Melody Hessing and Rebecca Raglon) of This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999). She is currently completing three projects on the intersections of environmental literatures and politics: the co-edited anthology Green Words / Green Worlds: Environmental Literatures and Politics (with Ella Soper and Amanda Di Battista), a monograph on Jane Rule’s queer contributions to Canadian public cultures, and a work of literary nonfiction on Toronto’s urban plantscapes.