Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Environmental Studies

Year Joined RCNJ: 2024

Contact Information

• Phone: 201-684-7623
• Email: notjen@ramapo.edu
• Office: G-259
• Office Hours: T 12:00-1:30PM: F 1:30-3:30PM

Education:

Ph.D., Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy with an advanced certificate in the Graduate Teaching Initiative, University of Oregon, 2022

M.A., English, University of Oregon, 2018

B.A., English (Honors, Creative Writing Track with Nonfiction Emphasis) and Anthropology (Honors) with High Distinction, University of Iowa, 2016

Courses Offered:

• World Sustainability
• Environmental History
• Ecological Literacy
• Energy and Society
• Honors: Values and Ethics
• Pre-Capstone and Capstone (SUST/ENST)

Teaching and Research Interests:

Environmental humanities; multispecies and environmental justice studies; multispecies ethnography; narrative theory, critical animal studies; energy humanities; autobiography studies; feminist science studies

I work across the environmental humanities and cultural anthropology, specializing in multispecies justice theory, critical animal studies, energy humanities, and literary and cultural studies. In the broadest sense, I study how scientific, technological, and cultural narratives limit or open up possibilities for pursuing justice among humans and nonhumans.

My first book, Multispecies Selves: Narratives of Justice with Nonhumans (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming) asks how contemporary life narratives reorganize selfhood around nonhuman beings in ways that may be productive for multispecies justice. I have also co-directed the Mining for the Climate project that examines how domestic lithium mining is unequally experienced by vulnerable communities and ecologies. More recently, I have begun an ethnographic and public-facing research project called “Multispecies Justice on the Shore” which looks at how different groups understand and respond to recent whale strandings along the New Jersey Shore, especially how they view humpback and North Atlantic right whale deaths as connected to offshore wind development.

Before coming to Ramapo College, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Environmental Teaching Fellow at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. You can read more about my academic history on my website.

Recent Publications: 

Special Issue:

1. 2024. Co-editor with Danielle Celermajer, “Multispecies Justice and Narrative,” the minnesota review, no. 103. https://read.dukeupress.edu/the-minnesota-review/search-results?fl_TocHeadingTitle=Special+Focus%3a+Multispecies+Justice+and+Narrative

Articles:

1. 2026. Second author, with Kyle Keeler. “AI Goes Nuclear: The Environmental Injustice of a Nuclear and Tech Renaissance,” Geoforum. First online on 10 April 2026.
2. 2026. “Pandemic Persons: Being Human in a Time of COVID,” Public Humanities (special issue on “Literature and Science in the Public Sphere”). First online on 6 March 2026.

1. 2024. With Danielle Celermajer, “Introduction: Narrative and Multispecies Justice,” Multispecies Justice and Narrative special issue, the minnesota review, no. 103. https://read.dukeupress.edu/the-minnesota-review/article-abstract/2024/103/50/393350/IntroductionNarrative-and-Multispecies-Justice

1. 2024. “Ho‘ailona: Homelessness, Extinction, and Conservation in Hawai‘i,” Environmental Humanities, vol. 16, no. 2, 309-30.

1. 2023. “Economies of Extinction: Animals, Labour, and Inheritance in the Longleaf Pine Forests of the U.S. South,” Animal Studies Journal (special issue on “Critical Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction”), vol. 12, no. 2, 14-40.

1. 2022. “Habituated Knowledges: The Entanglements of Science, Species, and Selfhood,” a|b: Auto|Biography Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 355-83.

• Winner of the 2023 Schachterle Essay Prize from the Society for the Study of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

1. 2021. “Barbadian Biocontact Zones and Threatened English Colonialism: Reading the Unruly Species of Richard Ligon’s History,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 28, no. 2, 436-61.

1. 2020. “Uncomfortable Encounters: Cockroach Narratives, Selfhood, and Togetherness,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 8, no. 2, 88-102.

1. 2020. “When Things Hail: The Material Encounter in Anthropocene Literature,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Technology, and Culture, vol. 28, no. 3, 285-307.

1. 2020. “Energy Anxiety and Fossil Fuel Modernity in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 43, no. 2, 118-33.

1. 2019. “Indigenous Radical Resurgence and Multispecies Landscapes: Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 31, no. 3- 4, 135-57.

1. 2019. “The Fire Ants of Hurricane Harvey: Displacement and Belonging in Houston,” Otherness: Essays and Studies (special issue on “Otherness and the Urban”), vol. 7, no. 1, 169-93.

1. 2018. “Inscriptive Energetics: Climate Change, Energy, Inscription,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, vol. 9, no. 1, 45-53.

1. 2017. “Creating a Barrio in Iowa City, Iowa, 1916-36: Mexican Section Laborers and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company,” The Annals of Iowa, vol. 76, no. 4, 406-32.

• Winner of the Mildred Throne – Charles Aldrich Academic History Award.

Book Chapters:

Forthcoming. “Multispecies Justice on the Shore: When Whales and Offshore Wind Collide,” Oxford Handbook of Multispecies Justice, edited by Danielle Celermajer, Claire Jean Kim, David Schlosberg, and Christine Winter.

Forthcoming. With Jessica Ng and Juan Manuel Rubio, “Remapping Petrified Ontologies: From Mineral Resources to Multispecies Relations,” becoming—Fluid, Objet-a Creative Studio.

Forthcoming. First author, then Juan Manuel Rubio, “Renewable Energy in the College Classroom: Lessons in Experiential Learning,” Teaching Energy Humanities, edited by Jason Molesky and Debra Rosenthal, Modern Language Association (MLA).

1. 2026. “Teaching Multispecies Relationships: Nonhumans and Knowledge Production in Science Writing,” Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom, edited by Lisa Ottum, Allison Dushane, and Ros Powell, Modern Language Association (MLA).

1. 2022. “The Climate of Extinction: Resistant Multispecies Communities in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Richard Powers’s The Overstory,” Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis, edited by Matthias Stephan and Sune Borkfelt, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, 179-199.

Media Coverage:

“Ecomodernism and Nuclear Energy,” Dystopia Now, July 11, 2025

“Building an Audio Series: Blue Lab’s ‘Mining for the Climate’,” EcoCast, April 4, 2025

“Podcasting for the Climate: A Conversation with Nathaniel Otjen, Juan Manuel Rubio, and Bethany Wiggin,” Edge Effects, March 27, 2025

“Mining for the Climate” Podcast, Charlotte Talks with Mike Collins, WFAE 90.7, Charlotte, North Carolina, August 28, 2024.

“Eight Environmental Podcasts to Follow in 2024,” Edge Effects, April 16, 2024.