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Jennifer Ladino

Professor of English; Director, MA-English; Co-Director, The Confluence Lab; Core Faculty, Environmental Science

Office

Brink Hall 227

Mailing Address

English Department
University of Idaho
875 Perimeter Drive MS 1102
Moscow, Idaho 83844-1102

Jennifer Ladino teaches American literature and literature and the environment.

  • Ph.D., English, University of Washington, 2006
  • M.A., English, University of Washington, 2001
  • B.A., English, University of Virginia, 1996

Jenn Ladino joined the English Department at University of Idaho in 2010, on the heels of a Fulbright Lecturing position at the University of Bergen, Norway (2009-10) and three years as an assistant professor at Creighton University. Her first book Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2012) traces a genealogy of nostalgia for nature in American literature and culture since 1890. It was shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s (ASLE) Best Ecocriticism Book award. Her second monograph, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (University of Nevada Press, 2019), explores the impacts of the physical environment on tourists’ emotions at National Park Service sites in the U.S. West. Jenn also co-edited, with Kyle Bladow, Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). 

Jenn has published articles in Fire; Emotion, Space, and Society; Environmental Humanities; Resilience; Western American Literature; Twentieth Century Literature; and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, among other peer-reviewed journals. She has also written chapters for books on climate justice, labor in the Anthropocene, aesthetic imaginaries, and other subjects. She is currently at work on an edited collection of essays called Experiencing War Memorials: Place, Feeling, and Public Memory. Most of these writing projects grew in some way out of Jenn’s thirteen summers working as a seasonal park ranger in Grand Teton National Park. 

At University of Idaho, Jenn teaches courses on American literature, including contemporary rural and U.S. West literatures; the environmental humanities; climate change fiction and film; and emotion and affect theory. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab, which uses interdisciplinary methods to study environmental issues in rural communities. With her Confluence Lab collaborators, Jenn has received major grants from the National Science Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. She has also been awarded a Fulbright Lectureship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. She is the former vice president for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and a past president of the Western Literature Association.

  • Environmental humanities
  • Affect theory
  • American literature and culture of the late nineteenth to twenty-first centuries
  • Rural literature, including the U.S. West
  • Public memory studies

Books

  • Memorials Matter: Affect and Environment at American Memory Sites. Forthcoming from University of Nevada Press, 2019.
  • Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. Co-edited collection of fourteen original essays, with Kyle Bladow. Co-authored introduction, “Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene.” Forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
  • Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Cross-listed in the "Under the Sign of Nature" series and the American Literatures Initiative.

Selected Articles and Essays

  • “What is Missing? An Affective Digital Environmental Humanities.” Commissioned by Joni Adamson for a special issue of Resilience. Forthcoming, 2018.
  • “Mountains, Monuments, and Other Matter: Environmental Affects at Manzanar.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 131-157.
  • “‘Sovereignty of the Self’: Interspecies Ethics in Sherman Alexie’s Face.” Forthcoming in Studies in American Indian Literatures, special issue on animal studies.
  • “Working with Animals: Regarding Companion Species in Documentary Film.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Ed. Sean Cubitt, Salma Monani, Stephen Rust. Routledge: 2012.
  • “‘Local Yearnings’: Re-Placing Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s Underworld.”The Journal of Ecocriticism 2.1 (January 2010): 1-18.
  • “‘A Home for Civilization’: Nostalgia, Innocence and the Frontier in Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.” Western American Literature 44.3 (Fall 2009): 225-249.
  • “‘A Limited Range of Motion?’: Multiculturalism, ‘Human Questions,’ and Urban Indian Identity in Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians.”Studies in American Indian Literatures 21.3 (Fall 2009): 36-57.
  • “For the Love of Nature: Documenting Life, Death and Animality in Grizzly Man and March of the Penguins.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.2 (Spring 2009): 53-90.
  • “New Frontiers for Ecofeminism: Women, Nature, and Globalization in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.” New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Andrea Campbell. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Ltd., 2008. 124-147.
  • “Unlikely Alliances: Notes on a Green Culture of Life.” Journal of Religion & Society Supplement Series 3. Ronald A. Simkins, Ed. Omaha: Kripke Center, 2008.
  • “Rewriting Nature Tourism in ‘an age of violence’: Tactical Collage in Marianne Moore’s ‘An Octopus.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 51.3 (Fall 2005): 285-315.
  • “Longing for Wonderland: Nostalgia for Nature in Post-Frontier America.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (Fall 2004): 88-109.

Book Reviews

  • A Hunger for High Country: One Woman’s Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country. By Susan Marsh. Terrain.org (2017).
  • Remembering Places: A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship between Memory and Place. By Janet Donohoe. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2015).
  • Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781-1924. By Karen L. Kilcup. Journal of American Studies 48.3 (2014).
  • Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Environmental Literature. By A. James Wohlpart. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2013). 
  • The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. By Neil Campbell. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.4 (Fall 2009).
  • Face. By Sherman Alexie. Western American Literature 44.3 (Fall 2009).

  • Experiencing War Memorials: Place, Feeling, and Public Memory (edited collection).
  • Stories of Fire: An Atlas of Pacific Northwest Climate Justice (co-edited collection, with Leah Hampton and Erin James).

  • Faculty member, Semester in the Wild Program
  • Visiting scholar, "Let's Talk About It!" series

  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant, "Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice" (in collaboration with University of Oregon and Whitman College, ($4.52 Million;). The UI portion of this project is "Stories of Fire: A Pacific Northwest Climate Justice Atlas" (Co-PI; 340,437), 2021-2024
  • National Science Foundation Advancing Informal STEM Learning Grant, "Communicating Fire: Integrative Informal STEM Learning Through Participatory Narratives" (Co-PI; $299.911), 2020-2022
  • Idaho Humanities Council Opportunity and Major Grants, “Our Changing Climate: Common Ground Through Climate Fiction” (PI; $995, $3,000), 2019 
  • President's Mid-Career Award, University of Idaho, 2018-2020
  • Excellence in Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Efforts, University of Idaho 2020-2021 and 2013-2014
  • CLASS Interdisciplinary Fellowship, “The Nature and Nuance of Climate Change Perceptions” University of Idaho (Co-PI; $10,000), 2019-20
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend – for Memorials Matter: Affect and Environment at American Memory Sites, 2016
  • Teaching Excellence Award, University of Idaho, 2016
  • CLASS Summer Research Grant, University of Idaho, 2015, 2019, 2022 
  • John Topham and Susan Redd Butler Faculty Research Award – Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 2008 and 2015
  • J. William Fulbright Scholar Award (lecturing position) – University of Bergen, Norway, 2009-10

English Department

Physical Address:
200 Brink Hall

Mailing Address:
English Department
University of Idaho
875 Perimeter Drive MS 1102
Moscow, Idaho 83844-1102

Phone: 208-885-6156

Email: englishdept@uidaho.edu

Web: English

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