My full cv is available here.
Community Engaged Scholarship | Environmental Humanities |Public Humanities | Energy Humanities | Climate Literacy & Climate Storytelling | Atlantic World and Colonialism | European Pre-Modern Literature and Culture in a Global Context | Utopianism | Ecotopianism | Multilingualism & Translation
Recent News
At long last, a co-authored article on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River Research Corps is in press with Environmental Humanities, and all the articles, including my long co-authored introduction, for a two-volume special journal issue bringing humanistic methods to bear on the technological and social path dependencies engendered by energy regimes, are now successfully through peer review and set for publication. Huge thanks to our anonymous reviewers! That special issue collects some of the work of the Intersecting Energy Cultures working group. I also co-wrote, directed, and co-produced a series of nine short films that illuminate our working group’s methods of community engaged scholarship in intensive energy landscapes.
Back in Philadelphia
In spring 2026, I am back at the University of Pennsylvania after three semesters away. This term, I’m teaching a large undergraduate course, Sustainability and Utopianism, in which we explore, among other topics, how the wonky concept of “sustainability” became identified, perhaps especially in the United States, with a “woke” agenda, leading the U.S. government in 2025 “to reject and denounce” the U.N.’s Sustainability Development Goals as “adverse to the rights and interests of Americans.” I am also teaching a small graduate seminar in German on utopian history and theory that dovetails with a historical exhibit that I’ve been helping to create in my adopted hometown of Germantown (Philadelphia) with the consortium of twenty houses, destinations, and museums that is Historic Germantown. The exhibit’s working title is “Unfinished Promises,” and it draws on my research and writing about the area’s colonial settlement, its utopian experimentation, and its enduring structures and experiences of coloniality. This is the second museum exhibit that draws on my work, or the third if you count the “cabinet of curiosities” I contributed to, intended for the Deutsches Museum in Munich. (The curious artifact I chose to exemplify anthropocene history was too fragile to travel from its home in Germantown, but it did get a lovely review in the Times Literary Supplement.) The second museum exhibit, at the Independence Seaport Museum, featured the Ecotopian Toolkit. I was so tickled to see scholarly terms from the Ecotopian Toolkit, turned into “flashcards” and explained in big wall text.
I had the privilege in July 2025 to organize a workshop in which each member site selected one Germantown object and shared its story. Together, we are building a process to establish an inclusive exhibit and interpretive materials that speak to Germantown’s diverse and changing neighbors and landscape. The exhibit will open in early summer 2026, and I’m excited that my students will get a behind the scenes look. Future students will have the opportunity to co-create the first workflow and installation for the planned “community cabinet,” a space designed to support community-led storytelling.
In January 2026, I participated in the National Humanities Alliance’s workshop, “Addressing Ecological Challenges Through Humanities/STEM Collaboration,” supported by the American Council on Learned Societies, and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation for which I am one of two academic advisors. Our express intent is to create a NSF funding stream for Humanities-STEM research partnerships, and while that may be a goal realizable in the longer term, it was a treat now to hear from visionary teams at colleges and universities around the nation and to co-present on work of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River Research Corps.
In February, I’ll head to Cornell to talk and learn about community engaged scholarship and teaching, and then in March, I’ll get to visit Cologne and Stockholm, continuing work with collaborators in both places.
In Stockholm, with a little trip to Cologne
In fall 2025, I was on a research leave from my home at the University of Pennsylvania to visit the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. I was associated with the Center for Anthropocene History and the Environmental Humanities Lab, and I also took intensive Swedish language classes at the Folkuniversitetet. Vad kul! In October 2025, I talked at length with KTH’s Future Humanities Initiative about “Climate Literacy and the Liberal Arts: Climate Storytelling and Educational Transformation” (click here to download the file), a conversation that led to the decision for KTH to create the second volume of the My Climate Story magazine. Vad roligt! (The first magazine issue is available here.) Also at KTH, I led a climate storytelling workshop in December for two dozen faculty and students and will offer two more in March 2026. Vad spännande! And, still at KTH, I co-organized “Futures Beyond ‘Transition,’” a workshop where I, inspired by Dionne Brand’s work, applied methods of salvage to consider stories about energy infrastructure, including that of “transition,” attuned in Brand’s words to “the genesis, the action and long duration, of certain regimes of power, that make invisible or ordinary, or a given, those power relations.” In my ongoing quest to test human-scale ways of making energy’s large technical systems visible, I collaborated to offer “Ghost Walk: Walking the Spectral Landscapes of Energy Pasts, and Futures,” a walk and ferry tour through parts of Stockholm’s energy distribution system, powered now largely by renewables but unthinkable without an existing system built for coal and gas.
In December, I also had the welcome chance to visit MESH (Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities) at the University of Cologne, one of the global hubs in the UNESCO BRIDGES network, on whose Governing Council I serve, and where I presented a workshop “Against Environmental Inhumanities: Tools for Engaging Publics” (available for download here). Also in December, I got to visit Stockholm University where I spoke about “Pre-Figuring Futures We Want: Community Engaged Scholarship and the Environmental Humanities” (download here). What a great group of scholars, of all career stages, and artists too.
In Princeton
In 2024-25, I held the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professorship in the Environment and Humanities at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. While at Princeton, I developed and taught two new courses that dovetail with two public research projects. Both developed meainigful avenues for students to participate in community engaged scholarship (CES). The first class, Climate Storytelling for Climate Action, invited students to pilot four climate storytelling workshops. Our collaborative work resulted in the creation of the first My Climate Story magazine, Princeton’s Climate Stories. The magazine launched during the Princeton Climate Storytelling Summit and Festival which I co-organized with Joshua Lowe from Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communications. The second course I taught, “(Out)living Fossil Fuels: Histories and Futures of Energy Transitions,” laid groundwork for a creation of a multi-media mid-Atlantic energy atlas designed to connect energy infrastructure maps with human-scale stories. Our class took four field trips, bringing us up close to pipelines and an oil refinery in the hopes of making our present dependence on fossils visible, palpable, and knowable. This class’s origins lie in a seminar I taught in 2019 at U Penn in which the community transformational project Futures Beyond Refining was co-created with community partners. These projects and this course are fundamental to a new book project, Futures Beyond Fossils, which explores how organizers are connecting across communities and across oceans, working to make shared path dependencies visible and to imagine other, more just relations beyond fossil futures.
More about me
My research and teaching span fields usually held apart: early modern German and Atlantic cultural history, on the one hand, and the environmental humanities, on the other. Presently, I am finishing a book, Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, that’s been long in the making and exemplifies my research interests. It aims to bridge the disparate timescales between human and natural histories. Propelled by years of archival research in multilingual collections in the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania and in German religious archives, the book reflects on our enduring coloniality today, and it considers the anticolonial histories and stories we need to confront the menace of the Anthropocene. I first began experimenting in methods and practices of connecting fields about a decade ago, when I first offered a class called Sustainability and Utopianism. With the help of its students and still other students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), it blossomed into the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Subsequently, and with a series of generous grants and gifts, it became a vibrant hub for community-engaged work and public environmental humanities. I was its director until 2024. Ongoing projects from that environmental humanities lab include three ongoing projects which I direct: The Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene, My Climate Story, and Intersecting Energy Cultures.
I began my academic career at Penn in 2003 and received tenure two weeks before the birth of my second child, based on a body of work exploring the popularization of reading and the rise of the novel in Europe while also probing early modern transnational fears of the commodification of culture and its increasingly global dimensions. My tenure home at Penn is in German, now part of the newly formed Department of French, Italian, and Germanic Studies. I also hold appointments to graduate groups in Comparative Literature and English as well as the Lauder Program for International Studies. At Penn, I have chaired the College taskforce on climate and ecoliteracy and served on strategic committees for energy, sustainability and the environment and for new directions in the humanities.
You can read a more fulsome statement about my work that I wrote in preparation for promotion to Professor at Penn in 2021.
Fun Facts
In addition to my traditional and community engaged scholarship, I live and play with my husband, kids (now ages 18 and 14), and two big dogs (ages 8 and 6) in Philadelphia. A few other fun facts about me: I am an enthusiastic but not particularly capable sailor. My motto remains: if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot. I buy too many books (but is that really a thing?); and I procrastinate by organizing and reorganizing them–alphabetically, by subject matter, sometimes by size, but NEVER by color.