Nicole Merola

Nicole M. Merola is professor of environmental humanities and American literatures. She teaches courses on a range of environmental humanities topics, including biodiversity and extinction studies, climate change cultures, discourses of the anthropocene, ecological literary studies, and theories of natureculture. In these and other courses, she asks students to consider the role that mediating technologies—such as novels, poems, photographs, paintings, built environments, and critical theory—play in apprehending and interrogating structures of classed, gendered, and racialized socioecological relationships. 
 
Merola’s current environmental humanities scholarship focuses on the intersection of affect, form, and socioecologies in contemporary culture. Most often, she writes about literature, film, photography, and painting. Key aims of this work are to particularize and historicize environmental emotion and highlight bodily vulnerability at scales from the personal to the planetary.

She has published on authors including Kathleen Flenniken, Juliana Spahr, Jeanette Winterson, T.C. Boyle, and Don DeLillo; painter Walton Ford; and photographers Jill Greenberg and Subhankar Banarjee. She has an essay on Jamaica Kincaid forthcoming in Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom and a chapter on Samantha Harvey forthcoming in The Anthropocene and Literature.