Dr. Stacy Alaimo
(she/they)
Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies for English;
Core Faculty Member, Environmental Studies;
COLT Participating Faculty; CSWS Faculty Affiliate
University of Oregon
Books
I write about the strange and often volatile relations between environmentalism, science, theory, literature, art, popular media, gender, and race. My concept of trans-corporeality develops and intertwines material feminism, new materialism, environmental justice, and environmental posthumanism. While my first three books build one coherent theoretical position, my new book, The Abyss Stares Back turns to ocean life, developing the "blue" or oceanic humanities, marine science studies, and critical animal studies.
Book in Progress: Acid Seas: Saturated Species, Extinction Horizons, Elemental Dissolves
Coming Spring 2025! Available for pre-order.
The Abyss Stares Back: Scientific and Aesthetic Encounters with Deep Sea Life (University of Minnesota Press, Posthumanities Series).
In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of "new" species in the deep sea?
How does the aesthetic vibrancy of abyssal beings jeopardize conventional scientific epistemologies and lure viewers into intimate modes of environmental concern?
The Abyss Stares Back investigates the science, art, film, science fiction, memoir and activism featuring deep sea life, from the work of William Beebe and Else Bostelmann in the 1930s to the recent Census of Marine Life. It investigates how aesthetic recognition of deep sea creatures scrambles scientific epistemologies and expands the terrain of environmental concern. I grapple with colonialist global visions, critique white masculinist narratives of exploration, and analyze how casting deep sea life as "alien" segregates it within a threatening and often racist conception of the abyss. Tracing the aesthetics of the surreal, weird, grotesque, marvelous, gorgeous, and most importantly, the creaturely, the book swirls together emerging theories and methods in the blue humanities, while suggesting a more fluid and potent sense of the aesthetic that saturates scientific captures. As threats to ocean ecologies accelerate and the deep seas receive scientific, literary, popular, and political attention, I hope this book will incite more discussion of the abyss at hand.
Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana UP, 2010). Environmental justice, environmental health, and material feminisms occupy the "trans-corporeal" sites where body, place, and substance intersect. Bodily Natures develops my new materialist, material feminist conception of environmental thought and practice. [Cover art: "Toxic Girl," Fawazo.]
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Winner of the ASLE Book Award for Ecocriticism, 2011
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Featured in New Books Network interview and podcast, 2013: http://newbooksnetwork.com/stacy-alaimo-bodily-natures-science-environment-and-the-material-self-indiana-up-2010/
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Plenary book session at the International Association of Environmental Philosophy, Eugene, Oregon, 2013.
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Korean translation,by Joon Yun, Konkuk University, Seoul, Institute of Body and Culture, published by Greenbee, as 말, 살, 흙, Word, Flesh, Dirt, 2018; second printing, 2018.
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Chapters translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Polish,
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Key concept, “trans-corporeality” taken up widely in humanities and social sciences, and included as an entry in Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman Glossary
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Art exhibit, “Transcorporeality” at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Germany, Fall 2019; published essay in catalogue, Fall 2020.
Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minnesota 2016) contends that the anthropocene is no time to set things straight. The book resists the temptation to engage in any sort of grand mapping that would be inimical to the embedded modes of epistemological, ethical, and political engagement that it traces, working instead through a surprising mix of theory, science, art, and activism. It begins by considering the pleasures of inhabiting places where the domestic refuses to domesticate and the walls decline to divide. It ends with an imaginary inhabitation of the dissolving shells of sea creatures who epitomize extinction in anthropocene seas. Along the way it considers queer animals, naked protests, the strange agencies of plastic pollution, and the gendered politics of climate change. Dwelling in the dissolve, where fundamental boundaries have begun to come undone, unraveled by unknown futures, can be a mode of ethical engagement and political inhabitation, which emanates from both feminist and environmentalist practices. Exposed locates new materialisms and material feminisms in fleeting ethical moments and compromised political sites that make up the massive temporal and geographical expanse of the anthropocene.[Cover art: Marina Zurkow, video still from "Slurb."]
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Italian translation, published by Mimesis, 2023.
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Korean translation, translated by Myung-Joo Kim, Chungnam National University Press, 2023.
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Chapter,“Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture and Pleasure of “Queer” Animals,” translated into Greek by John Giannis/Rigas Ioannis, for a DIY activist zine, with new illustrations, 2017.
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Inspired special issue of Simulacrum magazine (Amsterdam) “Practicing Exposure.” Including an interview with Max Litjens and Michelle Geraerts, 2019. http://simulacrum.nl/2019/call-for-papers-practicing-exposure-simulacrum-x-fiber-festival/
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Special session, “Author Meets Readers” at the Association of American Geographers, 2018.
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Podcast Interview, with Chris Richardson, This is Not a Pipe, February. 2018.https://www.tinapp.org/episodes/exposed
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U of MN: Blog post: “Climate Change, Carbon-Heavy Masculinity and the Politics of Exposure” http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2016/10/climate-change-carbon-heavy-masculinity.html (October, 2016)
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Culture of Energy Podcast, #39, with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, Rice University
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Podcast interview: New Books in Environmental Studies, New Books Network: Feb., 2017.
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Finalist for 2017 ASLE Book Award for Ecocriticism
Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell 2000) Written during a time when academic theory spurned the concept of "nature," this book delves into the negative discursive histories of that term, while posing more positive visions for feminist environmentalisms. By drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory and cultural studies, I advocate gender-minimizing, queer, intersectional feminisms that recast nature as feminist space. Darwinian feminists, Marxist feminists, birth control activists, postmodern artists and novelists, and queer writers reinvent the concept of "nature," contending that culture, not "nature" is the ground of essentialism and gender normatively. [Cover art: Ana Mendieta.]
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Excerpts on “Mother Earth” reprinted in Nuda Paper(commercial paper sold in Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, and London), Fall 2019.
