Prof. Stacey Balkan named Scholar of the Month by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) has named Professor Stacey Balkan Scholar of the Month for November, 2021.

Christy Tidwell interviewed Balkan as part of ASLE's Scholar of the Month announcement. An excerpt is below.

Long before I would submit my first essay to ISLE on the aesthetics of global toxicity, I was keenly aware of the greenwashing of environmental violence. The geography of my childhood (Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, and ultimately New Jersey) figured the stark antithesis of the pastoral idylls so celebrated in my high school English classes – effectively offering an imaginative salve for the industrial corridors of the Garden State. To offer one example: New Jersey’s lower Passaic River, brimming with the residue of Agent Orange (manufactured by Diamond Alkali), flanks the working-class city of Newark that is now home to some six acres of dioxin-contaminated soil; and yet, discussions around such egregious forms of corporate malfeasance and environmental violence were entirely disconnected from the formal study of landscape and “nature” to which I was accustomed in the early 1990s. Interested in the uneven geographies of environmental toxicity, I studied Environmental Conservation (and also English) in college and eventually pursued my PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where my coursework and research were situated at the intersection between Postcolonial and Environmental Studies.

Balkan's edited collection, Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere (Penn State University Press) is available for pre-order, and her monograph, Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India (West Virginia University Press) is available now.

pictured: Stacey Balkan and her Research Assistant, Asbury