Water Cosmology, Water Crisis, Water Power: Hydrometaphysics Beyond Metaphor

Jasper Eastman is an interdisciplinary scholar working on innovative methods to explore human relationality with the natural world. Their current focus is on waters and rivers in the Western United States. As a white, trans, and non-Indigenous scholar, they are committed to research that expands academic notions of knowledge production, and as a result, their work centralizes theories and scholarship from Queer Studies, Indigenous Knowledges, and Critical Human Geography. They hope their work queers the ways we relate to the environment and invites in different ways of being, knowing, and existing that is more community-focused (including our non-human kin), place-based, and sustainable.

Morgan Ellen Freeman is a doctoral student in American Studies. Her areas of concentration include the contemporary art and visual cultures of Black and Native practitioners. She is interested in this work as it relates to belonging, defining indigeneity, and place specificity.

Morgan was previously the Native American Art Fellow (2018-20) at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, serving as co-curator for the exhibitions: Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics, The Embodiment of Language, and This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World. She graduated from Tufts University with a BA in American Studies

Sally Hansen is a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar in the University of Notre Dame’s English Department. Her dissertation, “Sounding Stigma: Graphic Poetry, Mysticism in the Flesh, and the Marked Body,” explores visually disruptive poems and the shifting scenes of feeling they encode. These “graphic” poems, with their experimental typographies, eccentric prosodic markings, and/or expanses of space, foreground rupture as a way to make unspeakable histories palpable. In her dissertation, she feels through these sensory entanglements toward what Fred Moten calls “mysticism of the flesh”—the polyrhythmic performances of the dispossessed.

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice.

Dr. Howard is an African American literary scholar whose research places the literary and intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora in conversation with the environmental humanities. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support from the Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles can be found or are forthcoming at Callaloo, Souls, and Atlantic Studies. His current book project, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, illuminates the abiding relationship between blackness and the oceanic by undertaking a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diaspora literature. It argues that the blackness which dawned in the oceanic encounter of Middle Passage constitutes not social death, but ecological life. This black, which was first blue, indexes a global species event, whose expressive legacy harbors an ecological recalibration of human being on a blue planet.  

Dr. Howard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in African American literary studies, black studies, and the environmental humanities. His teaching surveys the literary, expressive, and intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora as a crucial reserve of environmental and ecological thought. Above all, and in deep collaboration with his students, his courses aim to facilitate the phenomenon of “black study.” That is, to attend, again and again, in literature and more, to black death and life, to no smaller end than the end of the antiblack world and the celebration and magnification of black life on earth.

Dr. Howard earned an M.A. and PhD from Duke University and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Lav Kanoi is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer (Anthropology) with the Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture (REEC) Initiative at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. His research in environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities, drawing on the social and natural sciences, focuses on the social and environmental dimensions of cities and urban development. His doctoral dissertation research at the combined Department of Anthropology and School of the Environment PhD program at Yale University centered on changing waterscapes in India’s National Capital Region of Delhi, where, like many other large human settlements, the city struggles to manage water equitably and sustainably in the face of increasing water crises and climate change. At Yale, Kanoi has coordinated, and is involved with, a number of different research groups and research collectives in Environmental Anthropology, South Asian Studies, Religion and Ecology, and the Environmental Humanities. Kanoi is also a literary translator working across classical and contemporary Indian and European languages, and has published academic and creative translations of texts from Latin to English, and from Bengali and English to Hindi. Kanoi feels strongly about the environment, cities, language(s), and the many different things that go into the making of higher education.

Dana Lloyd is assistant professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and affiliated faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. She is the author of Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas 2023) and the editor of Native American Religions: Teaching and Learning on Stollen Land (Routledge, forthcoming).

Brandon Menke is a poet and an assistant professor in English at the University of Notre Dame, where he is affiliate faculty with the Program in Gender Studies. He teaches and researches American literatures and visual art of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on comparative poetics, queer aesthetics, visual culture, and intermediality. His current book project, Slow Tyrannies: Queer Lyricism, Visual Regionalism, and the Transfigured World, examines lyric form, regionalist aesthetics, and networks of queer intimacy in American literature and visual art from the 1920s to the 1970s. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and his MFA in poetry from New York University. His critical and creative work appears or is forthcoming in such venues as ELH, POETRY, The Yale Review, Post45: Contemporaries, Columbia Journal, Denver Quarterly, and The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature, co-edited by Jonathan Culler.

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. His writing and scholarship engage the blue humanities, Anthropocene theory, Shakespeare, and eco-poetics. He has published seven books, most recently Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels (2024), An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), and Ocean (2020). He is editor or co-editor of seven collections, including Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature (2024) and A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age (2021). He has written many articles and chapters on ecocriticism, Shakespeare, early modern literature, and the blue humanities. He has published two poetry chapbooks, Two Crossings (2025) and Swim Poems (2022). He curated an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 – 1750” (2010). He blogs at The Bookfish, www.stevementz.com and (still) tweets @stevermentz.

Kelsey Alejandra Moore is a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of African American History and Black Studies. Her work focuses on rural black southern histories, raising questions about religion, culture, and development in the 20th century. Her current book project, Black Benthic: Submerged Matters and Conjure Knowledge in the Santee-Cooper Basin, examines black experiences with the New Deal era Santee-Cooper and Hydroelectric and Navigation Project.

As an inaugural 2022-2023 Crossroads Research Fellow based at Princeton University, Moore created “We Just Don’t Trust Our Memories to Stone,” a digital project that remaps cemeteries flooded by the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project. In doing so, the digital project remembers various Conjure knowledge(s) necessary to the lives and deaths of black South Carolinians. She also created “a fugitive’s map of the black south” and “finding the dead: another kind of fugitive map” as digital meditations on black place-making. 

Moore’s research on the flooded cemeteries in the Santee-Cooper Basin has been featured in Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories that Changed the World.

Her research has received support from Carter G. Woodson Institute in African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. 

Moore received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. She received a Dual B.A. in Africana Studies and Public Policy at New York University, where she graduated summa cum laude as the 2019 Valedictorian of the College and Arts and Science. 

Blair A. R. Nelsen has served as Executive Director of Waterspirit since 2019. Blair received her Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School and her BA with honors in Environmental Studies from Brown University. She brings a multi-faith, international perspective to her work in the field of religion & ecology after living in Venezuela and Brazil for many years. She currently represents the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace at the United Nations in addition to her Waterspirit ministry duties in New Jersey. In 2022, Blair co-authored the Climate Pastoral Care Course, available on Waterspirit’s website. She is a Good Grief Network Community FLOW Facilitator who has also been trained in climate café facilitation by the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. Additionally, she also holds a certificate in Climate Psychology from the California Institute for Integral Studies. Blair is a frequent writer and speaker about water, climate change, climate distress, and contemplative practices. She is fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Nathan Phelps is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame in the field of medieval literature. His dissertation, Recycled Ecologies: Nature and Creativity in Late-Medieval Literature explores the relationship between creativity and the environment by arguing that medieval poets modeled their reuse and remaking of existing stories on the cyclical change and transformation of nature. In addition to ecocriticism, natural philosophy, and poetic authorship, his research interests include medieval travel literature, medieval romances (especially Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), sound studies, critical animal studies, and such eclectic subjects as medieval discussions of magnets. He is currently preparing an article on medieval stories about loyal dogs for publication, and you can find his work published in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 

Samia Rahimtoola is a scholar of modern American literature and culture. Her research focuses on literary engagements with environmentalism, imperialism, and gender and sexuality. Most recently, her work attends to literary and social practices that offer alternatives to mainstream frameworks of environmental thought, such as rugged individualism, crisis and apocalypse, and the enframing of nature as resource and service.

Her scholarly monograph, Poetry From Spaceship Earth: Empire and Ecology in Post-1945 American Poetry, is under contract with University of Iowa Press’s Contemporary North American Poetry Series. The book draws on Black and postcolonial studies to argue that postwar U.S. poetic experimentation was driven by resistance to a then-emerging paradigm of knowing and managing nature. She is also at work on a book-length poem, Revelation Desert Flow, which investigates the racial landscapes of the transnational American desert, from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to the Middle East.

Arlinda Shtuni is an Albanian-born, Boston-based curator/artist, who believes that real discoveries happen in the in-between spaces, otherwise known as the margins of disciplines. Her curatorial projects contemplate our connection with the living world through tuning our senses to our environment and creating a receptive state in which to consider our collective future.

Arlinda’s art interventions have been held across galleries, museums and cultural institutions including the Nave Annex Gallery, the French Cultural Center, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum and others. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for Humanities, Mass Humanities, Mass Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council, the French Consulate in Boston and others.

Anthony Trujillo (OHKAY OWINGEH PUEBLO) works at the confluence of Native American and Indigenous studies, history, religious studies, anthropology, and the arts. His research attunes to the bio/geo-graphic manifestations of Indigenous engagement with – and resistance to – colonial/imperial religious, political and economic systems largely in the 18th and 19th centuries North American context but also drawing connections with contemporary Native nations and descendent communities. From a political and geographic angle, he seeks to discern the competing sources and configurations of sovereignty. He is also keenly interested in how expressive forms including music, visual art, oratory and literature become vital avenues through which Indigenous peoples and people of color move beyond the constraints placed upon their bodies, form intimate relationships of exchange among diverse communities, and maintain spaces and practices of belonging. His own revitalizing practices include immersing himself in music, photography, writing, deserts, forests, bodies of water, the night sky and cooking. He received his MDiv from Yale University and his BA in Music Performance from Seattle Pacific University.