Assistant Professor

About

  • Website:

    http://www.lynnbadia.com

  • Role:

    Faculty

  • Position:

    • Assistant Professor

  • Concentration:

    • Literature

  • Department:

    • English, English Grad, and English Undergrad

  • Education:

    • B.A., English, Pomona College
    • Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Biography

Professor Badia teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and theory, focusing on topics related to the Environmental and Energy Humanities and the history and philosophy of science. Her courses consider issues such as climate, energy, environmental justice, ecology, and the Anthropocene from the perspective of the humanities. In 2015, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, as part of the Climate Histories Research Group at CRASSH Cambridge and the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research on the Environment initiative. Recently, she was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2017) and the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellow (2014-2015) at the University of Alberta.

Professor Badia’s research is published by and forthcoming from Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Open Library of Humanities, Cultural Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Fordham University Press, Routledge, and West Virginia University Press. She is currently completing a monograph, Imagining Free Energy: Fantasies, Utopias, and Critiques of America, that introduces the concept of "free" or unlimited energy as a critical imaginary in American society since the beginning of the industrial era. Additionally, she is co-editing a book and a special issue of Resilience that share the title Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather, Climate, and Atmosphere. 

Courses

  • E339: Literature of the Earth

    In this course we explore how literary narratives shape our knowledge and experience of the natural world. Covering several literary genres over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we gain critical perspective on how literature informs our planetary and environmental consciousness. Over the course of the semester, we develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about environmental issues while examining the history of concepts such as “nature” and “wilderness” and their entanglements with cultural and literary projects.

  • E456: Topics in Critical Theory: Literature and Philosophy of the Non-Human: Plants, Animals, Minerals

    Over the last fifty years, experiments in narrative form have created new ways of seeing and thinking from non-human perspectives. This course examines the theoretical and narrative project of understanding non-human agency, deep ecology, and, as Donna Haraway has described, “multispecies becoming-with.” In the process of taking on the perspective of the animal, plant, and mineral, the texts examined in this course necessarily reconsider what it means to be human. 

  • E370: American Literature in Cultural Contexts: “Climate Fiction”

    In this course we will consider the challenge of representing climate in American literature and film, from the early twentieth century to the present day. Climate has traditionally referenced the weather it gathers, the mood it creates, and the setting it casts. In the era of the Anthropocene, climate indexes not only natural forces but the whole of human society: the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, and the possible futures we may encounter. In other words, with every weather event, we are aware that the forces indexed by climate are as much environmental and physical as they are social and cultural. We will consider the emerging genre of “Cli-Fi” (“climate fiction”) and a range of related themes such as adaptation, human engineered weather, water wars, Indigenous knowledge frameworks, and environmental justice. Readings may include the work of authors and theorists such as Paolo Bacigalupi, Amitav Ghosh, Ann Kaplan, Barbara Kingsolver, Naomi Oreskes, Kim Stanley Robinson, Patricia Smith, and Kyle Powys White.

  • E636: Environmental Literature and Criticism (Graduate Level)

    This course is a focused examination of environmental literature and film, from the early twentieth century to the present day. We will cover a range of literary genres, and, in the process, learn to think critically about how texts not only represent the natural world but also narrativize and shape our interactions with it. Over the course of the semester, we will examine texts utilizing critical frameworks informed by environmental justice, feminism, (post)colonialism, and Indigenous perspectives. Readings may include the work of authors and theorists such as Warren Cariou, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Donna J. Haraway, Ursula K. Heise, Lydia Millet, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kyle Powys White.