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
• Environmental Literacy

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; 20th and 21st US literature, feminist theory; posthumanist theory

I work in the environmental humanities, 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 either limit or open up possibilities for pursuing justice among humans and nonhumans.

I’m currently writing my first book — Entangled Lives: Multispecies Selves, Justice and Narratives — which asks how contemporary life narratives reorganize selfhood around nonhuman beings in ways that may be productive for multispecies justice. I’m also co-directing an ongoing project that examines how the energy transition is unequally experienced by vulnerable communities and ecologies.

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:

2024. Co-editor with Danielle Celermajer, “Multispecies Justice and Narrative,” the minnesota review, no. 103.

Articles:

2024. With Danielle Celermajer, “Introduction: Narrative and Multispecies Justice,” Multispecies Justice and Narrative special issue, the minnesota review, no. 103.
2025. “Ho‘ailona: Homelessness, Extinction, and Conservation in Hawai‘i,” Environmental Humanities, vol. 16, no. 2, 309-30.
2026. “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.
2027. “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.

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.
2022. “Uncomfortable Encounters: Cockroach Narratives, Selfhood, and Togetherness,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 8, no. 2, 88-102.
2023. “When Things Hail: The Material Encounter in Anthropocene Literature,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Technology, and Culture, vol. 28, no. 3, 285-307.
2024. “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.
2025. “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.
2026. “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.
2027. “Inscriptive Energetics: Climate Change, Energy, Inscription,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, vol. 9, no. 1, 45-53.

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. 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).

Forthcoming. “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).

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:

“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.