Nicole Merola

Nicole M. Merola is professor of Environmental Humanities & 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. Key aims of this work are to particularize and historicize environmental emotion and highlight bodily vulnerability at scales from the personal to the planetary. Additional areas of research interest include: community-based learning, critical and inclusive pedagogies, models of cross-disciplinary co-teaching and place-based learning.