Conference Dates: August 30-31
Venue: AB1079
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Brian Russell Roberts is a Professor of English and Director of the English Graduate Program at Brigham Young University, where his scholarship and teaching have focused on American studies, archipelagic and oceanic studies, African American literature, modernism/modernity, and the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in in journals including American Literature, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA, and he has received the Darwin T. Turner Award for best article of the year in African American Review. His books include Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Virginia, 2013), Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke, 2016), Archipelagic American Studies (Duke, 2017), and Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (Duke, 2021). He has worked in Indonesian-to-English literary translation, translating fiction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Sitor Situmorang. His own work on archipelagic American studies has been translated into Spanish, and his book Borderwaters appeared in Russian translation in 2023.
Shen Hou is a professor of environmental history in the
History Department, Peking University, Beijing, junior Yangtze River Scholar. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2011 and 2013. She is the author of The City Natural: Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism (English, 2013), and Cities without Walls: Nature and Urban Places in American History (Chinese, 2021). She has published around 50 articles, essays, and book reviews in Chinese and English, and is the translator of Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (2018) and Planet of Desire: Earth in the Age of Humans (2024). She is currently finishing a book on Boston’s environmental history and working on a book project about coastal cities.
Erika Weinthal is a Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy and a member of the Bass Society of Fellows at Duke University. She specializes in global environmental politics and environmental security with an emphasis on water and energy. She is author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia (MIT Press 2002), which received the 2003 Chadwick Alger Prize and the 2003 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize. She co-authored Oil is not a Curse (Cambridge University Press 2010) and Water Quality Impacts of the Energy-Water Nexus (Cambridge University Press 2022). She has co-edited Water and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Shoring Up Peace (2014), The Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy (Oxford University Press 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (2023). She is also a founding Vice President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and an associate editor at Environment & Security. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015”.
