
Dr Nicole Seymour
Environmental Humanities Fellow, April - July 2021
Home Institution: California State University, Fullerton
Biography: Nicole Seymour researches the roles that queer styles and affects play in environmental movements. She is the author of two monographs, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). The former received the 2015 Book Award for Ecocriticism from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, while the latter was supported by a Carson Fellowship from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany.
Dr. Seymour is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, where she serves as the Graduate Advisor for the Environmental Studies Program. She is also a curator for NXTerra, an open-access repository of climate pedagogy materials developed by faculty across the California State University and University of California systems. In addition to her fellowship project, Dr. Seymour is currently working on topics including feminist plastic art, vegan satire, and contemporary Indigenous poetry.
Project Description: As an Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellow at IASH, Dr. Seymour will be finishing a public-facing book manuscript on glitter. Often thought of as fun and frivolous, this substance has surprisingly found its way to the center of recent political controversies. The book will cover phenomena ranging from the Mexican and U.S. trend of “glitter-bombing” misogynist and anti-gay leaders to the development of biodegradable glitter in response to concerns over microplastic pollution. This project is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing’s “Object Lessons,” which the press describes as “a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.”