Co-Directors
Joshua Calhoun (Associate Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) specializes in Shakespeare, early modern poetry, the history of media, publicly engaged research, and the environmental humanities. His first book, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (UPenn Press, 2020), explores the ecopoetic interplay between literary ideas and their physical containers and argues that the flora, fauna, and mineralia from which a Renaissance text—or clay tablet, or birch bark map, or iPhone—is made are legible, significant elements of its poetic form. His work draws on scholarly as well as journalistic training, and his commitment to questions about ecology, conservation, and wilderness are deeply informed by his experiences growing up in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Calhoun is also the co-founder of Holding History, a mentorship-driven public engagement project that involves hands-on training in bookmaking and archival research.
Leila Kate Norako (Associate Professor of English, University of Washington) specializes in late medieval literature and culture, with particular interests in Middle English romance, crusades literature, premodern critical race theory, the global Middle Ages, premodern queer studies, and contemporary fantasy. Her book, Monstrous Fantasies: England’s Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery (Cornell UP, 2024), examines how medieval English romance mobilized crusade history to construct a recuperative fantasy of Christian triumphalism, arguing that these fantasies played a formative role in shaping English cultural identity and that their influence continues to be felt today. Her work has appeared in The Chaucer Review, Literature Compass, and postmedieval, and she serves as the creator and general editor of The Richard Coer de Lyon Multitext, a digital project providing scholars and students with semi-diplomatic editions of all extant versions of the romance alongside research and teaching resources. Norako is also a poet; her chapbook, Nautilus, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2019.
Advisory Council
Joseph Campana (William Shakespeare Professor of English and Director for the Center for Environmental Studies, Rice University)
Joseph Campana is a poet, arts writer, and scholar of the literature and culture of early modern England. Campana serves as the William Shakespeare Professor of English, the Director of the Center for Environmental Studies, the co-director of the ENST minor, and a co-PI on the Mellon Foundation-funded Diluvial Houston grant.
Zach Dylan Jackson (PhD Candidate, English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia)
Zach Dylan Jackson explores the emergence of early notions of the “environment” in Middle English literary, legal, and historiographical discourse. He also enjoys playing and overthining neo-medieval video games and plans to incorporate critical game methods into her multimedia dissertation. Twitch | Email
Gretchen Minton (Professor of English and College of Letters and Science Distinguished Professor, Montana State University)
Gretchen Minton has published extensively on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including several critical editions of early modern plays. Her 2020 monograph, Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Lover Affair with the World’s Most Famous Author, is the winner of several regional book awards.
In addition to her scholarly work, Minton is a dramaturg, script adaptor, and director. She is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and the co-founder of Montana InSite Theatre, which is dedicated to site-specific performances that use classical texts to address current environmental issues. She has enjoyed the opportunity to speak to audiences and performing artists at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the US, as well as to audiences in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Indonesia, and Australia.
In 2023 she was a Fulbright Scholar hosted by James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, where she wrote and staged an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that is set in North Queensland and speaks to the intertwined human and ecological histories of this region. Email
Kirsten Schuhmacher (Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies, University of Connecticut)
Kirsten Schuhmacher studies early modern poetry & prose and rhetoric through an ecocritical lens. Most of the time, you can find her talking to her plants and learning about new trees. Email
Rob Watson (Distinguished Professor, English, UCLA)
Rob Watson mainly teaches Shakespeare and 17th century poetry. His Back to Nature won the Dietz Prize, “awarded annually for the best book published in early modern studies,” and the ASLE Prize for the year’s best book of ecocriticism. His other books have studied Shakespeare, Jonson’s comedies, Renaissance mortality-anxiety, Throne of Blood, and the malfunctions of cultural evolution. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and dozens of other journals His ecocritical articles include “Renaissance selfhood and Shakespeare’s comedy of the commons,” “Tell Inconvenient Truths, but Tell Them Slant,” “Protestant Animals: Puritan Sects and English Animal-Protection Sentiment, 1550-1650,” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Ecology of Human Being.” Email
Oecologies 