Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities at UCLA. He has been an environmental journalist and science writer for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows. Christensen is currently finishing a book entitled “Critical Habitat: A History of Thinking with Things in Nature.” He is also engaged in a multidisciplinary digital environmental humanities research project on nature in cities, as well as a large collaborative project to crowdsource a new, public environmental history of the San Francisco Bay Area. Christensen is editor of Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly magazine published by the University of California Press that brings scholars, researchers, journalists, writers, artists, photographers, policymakers, advocates, and the public into common conversations about California in the world. And he is a regular columnist at LA Observed.

Ursula K. Heise is Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at UCLA and a faculty member of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and was President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in 2011. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary environmental culture, literature and art in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; theories of globalization; literature and science; and the digital humanities. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur [After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture] (Suhrkamp, 2010). Her most recent book is Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Michelle Niemann is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities and English at UCLA. In August 2014, she earned her PhD in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was active in the Center for Culture, History and Environment (CHE). Her research focuses on poetry and poetics and contemporary environmental thought and culture and her articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and Victorian Poetry. She is currently working on a book project titled “Organic Forming: Poetry, Ecology, Food.”