Gillen Wood, Director (Engish)

Gillen Wood is Nicholson Professor in English and Director of the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities at the University of Illinois. He serves also on the executive committee of the new Center for Transformative Climate Solutions at Illinois. He has received numerous awards for both research and teaching while at Illinois. His sustainability-themed course offerings include ENG 476 “Green Romanticism,” ENG 300 “Can Poetry Save the Earth?” and the forthcoming ENG 293 “Culture and Sustainability.” Since 2005, his research into the aesthetics of nature in European philosophy and art has been directed toward a more material engagement with the physical and social sciences, and the development of a new “eco-historical” methodological framework for humanistic inquiry into global socio-ecological relations in the modern period. His recent publications include “What is Sustainability Studies?” and “Sustainability: Ethics, History, and Culture.” His current book project is a global study of the social and ecological impacts of the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, entitled “Frankenstein’s Weather: Mt. Tambora and the Global Climate Dystopia, 1815-18,” to be published by Princeton University Press.