Alexander Menrisky
Assistant Professor in English, University of Connecticut
I am the author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Assistant Professor in English at the University of Connecticut. Previously, I taught in the Department of English and Communication and the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Departments of English and Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. I specialize in the literary and cultural history of the twentieth and twenty-first century United States, with emphasis on environmental resonances and multiethnic traditions, and teach broadly in writing, literature, American studies, and the environmental humanities.
My research agenda generally focuses on conversations surrounding identity and environment to consider how writers, activists, and other figures have represented and mediated tensions among these ideas, as well as what social effects these representations have had or potentially might have. Wild Abandon examines how environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s borrowed rhetorical strategies from identity-based movements of the era. My latest project, tentatively titled Everyday Ecofascism, considers how representations of consumption (of landscapes, food, drugs, microbes, and bodies as well as conventional commodities) inform casual and systemic, as well as overt and intentional, expressions of white-supremacist, anti-Indigenous, and anti-immigrant thinking in environmental art and politics. My work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Criticism, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Mosaic, GLQ, Resilience, Edge Effects magazine, and elsewhere. I also curate the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s Teaching Resources Database.
