Professor
PhD Coordinator
Credentials
PhD Sociology, York University
MA Sociology, York University
BA (Honours) Sociology, University of Victoria
Research Keywords
Environmental Humanities; Queer, Multispecies & Feminist Ecologies; Critical Plant Studies; Public Humanities & Cultures; Ecocriticism & Environmental Writing; Biopolitics.

Contact Information
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
416 736 2100
Research Interests
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)
Perhaps my most important task as a teacher, writer, and researcher is to help cultivate the “plurality” of which Arendt speaks: we create a common world as we share and reflect together on our unique, embodied relationships to it. This connection of worldliness and plurality is especially true for our relations to the more-than-human world. By developing a deeply situated understanding of the multispecies communities of which we are a part, we can appear to one another to discuss them, and by holding our perceptions and experiences up to the views of multiple others, we can truly understand both our situatedness and our relatedness.
My work has pursued this task of creating a common world from multiple angles:
- theoretical / philosophical writing on ecofeminism and queer ecology as ways to explore the embodied, intersectional politics of sex, gender and nature;
- sustained engagement with ecocriticism and ecocultural studies through both professional leadership and engagements with diverse Canadian literary ecologies;
- creative explorations of place-based, narrative scholarship highlighting the importance of story to the development of a decolonizing, relationally-based practice of environmental justice; and
- interdisciplinary research on plants as participants in multispecies biopolitical entanglements, and on people/plant relationships as both vectors of settler-capitalist dispossession and sites of resistance and transformation.
Research Projects
Research Output
Recognition & Awards
- York University Research Leader Award
- Faculty of Environmental Studies Dean’s Research Award
- Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship
- Lansdowne Visiting Scholar, University of Victoria
- Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture
- Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, University of Oregon
Courses
Course Code | Title |
---|---|
ENVS 1800 | Environmental Writing / Writing the Environment |
ENVS 8102 | PhD Seminar |
ENVS 5103 | Nature and Society |
ENVS 6149 | Culture and Environment |
ENVS 3320 | Sex, Gender, Nature |