EcoCast: Environmental Conversations On Creative Art, Scholarship, and Teaching. The official podcast of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Each episode features interviews with guests sharing their scholarship, creative work, or teaching.
Subscribe:.rss.atom.json.md.m3u.pls
Live Last read · last published · next check
Saves to your Listen queue, to pick up on another day or another device.
We sat down with eco poet D. M. Gordon to discuss her new poetry collection Loosestrife for Porcupines! Full of capybaras, horses, porcupines, and countless other nonhuman beings, the poetry collection reflects the verdant area in which Gordon lives, where she is surrounded by "everybody." We are happy to have a poet on after a long stretch of academic (though still wonderful!) texts, putting into…
We sat down with the co-editors and one contributor to a new collection: Italian/American Fantastika: Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction from Pinocchio to Star Trek. The text looks at how Italian-Americans and also Italian-Canadians have contributed to some of the most notorious speculative stories in horror, fantasy, and science fiction in ways previously overlooked. The Ecofeminist Fantastika…
We spoke with Denise Baden to chat about her work as a sustainability professor in a business school. From developing sustainability curriculum, writing theatre to resist doom and gloom environmentalism, or championing characters in popular media that lead sustainable lives, Baden is busy. We discuss her initiatives and what's to come in this month's episode. For more of Denise: Website:…
We sat down with Matthew Thompson to discuss his forthcoming book: On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s. The book charts various environmentalisms in 1970s films, containment vs. contamination, that evolved out of the environmentalist work of the 1960s typified by Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. Thompson's idea of "contamination" jockeys with the conceptual north star of recent…
This month, we got to speak with Chaz Yingling and Andrew Kettler about their forthcoming book: The Once and the Future Cow. The book's aim is to show an understudied history of the cow not just in the American West, but on the islands in the Caribbean. But recentering the cow also means paying attention not to the typical unilateral framing of human-nonhuman interaction as humans impacting cows,…
Kaja sat down with Lindsay and I this month to discuss how scholars typically focus on the "were" in the term werewolf, but she wants us to bring more focus to the "wolf" aspect. Why are we fascinated by the prospect of becoming a wolf, and why do coyotes captivate us when they come into cities? In her new book, The Ecogothic Werewolf in Literature: Wolves, Woods and Wilderness, she tells us what…
What is ecofascism and who "is" ecofascist or "does" ecofascism? Alex Menrisky walks us through why his new book is titled "Everyday Ecofascism," or the ways that ecofascism is not solely a far-right governmental structure but a genre, a mode of storytelling. This means that ecofascism emerges through not just laws and political leaders but through quotidian acts and utterances by citizens and…
This month we had a fascinating conversation with Bart Welling, whose presentation at the ASLE Conference this last summer was caught by Lindsay! Bart's research was informed by his own road trip around the country, a month-long, 12,000-mile trip. This chat was particularly special as Bart is still completing his book project, and we aim to have more episodes in the future with more…
This month we sat down with Jon Pitt to discuss his new book "Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan." The book spans Japanese writers and filmmakers from the 1930s to today whose works all ask a similar question: What would it mean for humans to be more like plants? Looking at the ways that this question informed critiques of colonialism and even today immigration in these…
For this month’s episode, we sat down with Rachel DiNitto to discuss the pioneering edited volume Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema (2024) and her own chapter in it on "Toxicoscapes." With thematic coverage that ranges from contaminated childhoods, to nuclear anxiety, and all the way to apocalyptic futures, this manuscript both expands the overall definition of “eco-disaster” and focuses in on the…
