During this workshop, we will be discussing Sarah Ensor’s work-in-progress, “Queer Half-Lives and the Poetics of Fallout.” Ensor is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. She is currently at work on two book projects, Spinster Ecology: Rethinking Relation in the American Literary Environment, which considers how the figure of the spinster – and a spinsterly literary aesthetic – can help both to identify and to remedy the theoretical impasses that divide queer theory from ecocriticism, and Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity, which takes a range of queer practices characterized by temporariness and provisionality as inspiration for a model of environmental care that brackets questions of longevity and allows us to glimpse the immanent ethical possibilities of the present. Her work has been published in the ecocriticism special issue of American Literature, the pedagogy special issue of American Literature, Environmental Humanities, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and the edited collection Against Life. With Susan (Scott) Parrish, she is co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment. From 2012-2017, she was Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University in Portland, OR.

Please join us for breakfast and a fantastic discussion in 201 Umrath Hall. As always, please contact Melanie Micir (mmicir@wustl.edu) for more information and/or for a copy of the pre-circulated essay to be discussed.