Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
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Contributors
Katie Ahearn resides in Denver, Colorado where she is a Ph.D. candidate in literary studies at the University of Denver. She is currently working on completing her interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation entitled: Imagining Equality in 17th Century England: Literary Renegotiations of the Sexual Contract in Astell, Cavendish, and Philips. Kathleen teaches writing, literature & politics, and women’s memoirs at the University of Denver. In addition, Kathleen has published poetry in regional publications and is working on a memoir entitled: Tea with Lhasa.
Fiona Allon is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. Her research interests include cultural studies of everyday life and technology, cultural geography, urban cultures, and suburban homes and gardens. She was a Chief Investigator on the research project Everyday Water: Values, Practices, Interactions.
Ray Chandrasekara is Assistant Professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, New York. His research interests include concerns with conflict over water issues in South and Southeast Asia, geopolitical concerns in the region. He has also translated Malay and Indonesian literature and has published his translation with Cornell University Press. Currently, he is working on additional translations and other papers dealing with water issues in Southeast Asia.
Michelle Eischen is a post-modernist representational painter whose work is filled with personal symbolism. Her artwork features expressive images that are reflective on contemporary trends in figurative painting. She says, "My paintings are the result of coalescence of thinking of painting and life through the contemplation of metaphor. That is, the way image can act as a metaphor for 'art.'" Michelle received her MFA in 2004 from the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. She has also studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, and Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan.
Margaret (Meg) H. Ferris is a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University's School of Religion. Meg is currently writing her dissertation titled, Blue Theology: An Ecotheology and Ethic of Water for Southern Californian Christians. Meg focuses on Ecotheology and theology and economics. Meg first began her work on Ecotheology with Rosemary Radford Ruther, and later studied with John C. Cobb, who introduced her to the importance of economics to the study of religion and ecology. Meg's focus on water arose from living in Southern California, where water is paradoxically both scarce and plentiful.
Daniel Fusch is a Conference Director at Academic Impressions and a recent graduate from the doctoral program in English at the University of Denver. His specialty is Renaissance Studies, with an interest in the epistemology of wonder in such varied discourses as Renaissance drama and seventeenth-century street literature. He has just completed a dissertation concerning ceremonial wonder in Shakespeare's late plays, is working on several articles regarding the ethics and epistemology of wonder in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and has recently co-organized the "Attention/Inattention" graduate conference at the University of Denver (October 2005), which brought together scholars, creative writers, and translators from across North America. Published articles include "Wonder and Ceremonies of Waking in Shakespeare’s Late Plays," in Mediterranean Studies. His other publications include short poetry in journals such as Modern Haiku, Tundra, Acorn, and black bough.
Stefan Helmreich is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is interested in the scientific and social transformation of the biological category of "life" in the age of genetics, computers, and biotechnology. He has written extensively on Artificial Life, a field of inquiry devoted to employing computers to simulate biological dynamics. His ethnography of Artificial Life scientists is entitled Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998). He is presently at work on a book about marine microbiologists who work in such sites as hydrothermal vents and the open ocean and who think of "life" as a property that scales from genomes to oceanic biomes.
Tiffany Holmes is an electronic media artist currently focused on using technology and art to increase public awareness about environmental issues, specifically the management of water and electricity resources. Holmes recently received a public art commission from the state of Illinois to create a public installation that images real time electricity loads in the new National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) building. Currently, Holmes is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches courses in interactivity, automated drawing and the history of electronic media and environmental art. More information is available at: www.tiffanyholmes.com .
W. Scott Howard teaches courses in poetics & historiography, early modern English literature & culture, and modern & postmodern American poetry at the University of Denver, where he is Associate Professor of English. He is currently co-editing (with Sara van den Berg) John Milton’s Divorce Tracts: Texts and Contexts. Scott’s articles, essays, and poems have appeared in various books and journals, including: Reading the Middle Generation Anew (Iowa, 2006); Milton Quarterly (2004); Grief and Gender: 700-1700 (Palgrave, 2003); Many Mountains Moving (2001); and Denver Quarterly (2000). His vita and links to selected publications and syllabi may be found at http://www.du.edu/~showard.
Basia Irland has focused on international water issues in her art projects for almost thirty years. She has received over forty grants and awards including a Senior Fulbright Research Award for Southeast Asia, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship Grant and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Grant, enabling her to create rainwater harvesting systems and global waterborne diseases projects. She has filmed and directed numerous video documentaries and her art is in collections around the world. Irland is a Professor at the University of New Mexico where she has formed an interdisciplinary Arts and Ecology emphasis. Irland's full biography can be found here. Please also see her Water Library online artist collection.
James (Jamie) Linton is in the final stages of completing a doctorate in Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. His dissertation is titled, "What is Water? The History and Crisis of a Modern Abstraction." He has researched and written extensively on a variety of North American environmental and historical issues, and is author of Beneath the Surface: The State of Water in Canada. (Canadian Wildlife Federation, 1997)
Debra Livingston is studying for a Doctorate of Creative Arts, which includes a substantial artistic output. The thesis is concerned with the possibility of creating a new aesthetic as a strategy to increase awareness about how we interact with nature. The exegesis will use a subjective research framework that has the potential to bring art, nature and technology into a more harmonious unity--whilst the creative component aims to advance ideas, explanations and epistemologies about technology and changing visual perception to establish a new way of seeing. This will be acheived through exploration with traditional aesthetics, stereo-visual practice and, in particular, experimentation with 3-D immersive photographic and video imagery. Her expertise includes digital imaging, photography, video and graphics software applications; her background is in traditional drawing, painting and graphic design (pre digital) as well as exhibiting these works. Debra lectures in graphic design and digital imaging practices for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast, in graphic design and digital imaging practices, as well as curate annual student digital imaging exhibitions that display the theme of technology and society.
Currently at work on a book on the significance of rivers in American culture, T.S. McMillin is the author of Our Preposterous Use of Literature: Emerson & the Nature of Reading (2000), as well as numerous articles on the American Transcendentalists and their legacy. Born near the Detroit River in southeastern Michigan, he now lives in the Black River watershed of northern Ohio with his wife, Laurie Hovell McMillin, and their two sons, Liam and Jack. At present he is the chair of the Department of English at Oberlin College.
Kathryn Miles is Associate Professor and Director of Writing at Unity College in Unity, Maine, where she teaches in the Environmental Writing Program. Her research interests include sustainable land use patterns, environmental epistemology, and American women writers. Her scholarly essays have appeared in such publications as Colby Quarterly, World Environments, and Women Writers. She is also the co-editor of Watershed Literature: Writings from the Gulf of Maine, a forthcoming anthology.
Bradley John Monsma is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Integrative Studies at California State University, Channel Islands. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters on multicultural literature and environmental pedagogy as well as The Sespe Wild: Southern California’s Last Free River (U of Nevada P, 2004).
John M. Polimeni is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, New York. He is managing editor of the International Journal of Transdisciplinary Research. His research interests include economic development, geopolitical concerns over natural resources, and ecological/transdisciplinary economics. His current research is on energy efficiency and usage in China and India, agricultural issues, and transportation economics.
Cory Shaman will defend his dissertation, "Contemplating the Great Waste: Representations of Natural Disaster and Recovery in the American Southwest," in the early fall of 2006 at the University of Mississippi. His work focuses on environmental literature of the American South and Southwest, with a particular emphasis on environmental justice issues and questions of ecological discourse and risk theory. He begins work in August as an Assistant Professor at Arkansas Tech University.
Julie Trottier is lecturer in the politics of water development at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at the University of Newcastle, UK. She researches and teaches on the political ecology of water and specialises on the Middle East. She is the author of Hydropolitics in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, PASSIA, 1999 and co-editor of Water Management Past and Future, Oxford University Press, 2004.