Environmental Studies is excited to announce that Dr. Lisa Sideris and Dr. Grace Wu will be joining the Program!
Lisa Sideris comes to the Environmental Studies Program from Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from Indiana University in 2000. Prior to returning to Indiana University as a faculty member in 2005, she taught at Pace University (Manhattan) in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department, and at McGill University in Montreal, jointly appointed in the School of Environment and Religious Studies. Her primary area of research is environmental thought and ethics at the intersection of science and religion. Her first book, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (Columbia University Press 2003) explored areas of conflict and compatibility between evolutionary science and eco-theological perspectives. In 2009, she published an edited collection of interdisciplinary essays on the life and work of Rachel Carson, titled Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (SUNY Press). Her book Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017) critically examines the discourse of wonder that often inflects science-based spiritual movements that place humanity within a deep-time, sacred narrative of cosmic and planetary evolution. She is Co-PI of a $1M grant from the Luce Foundation for a project called “Being Human,”and oversees the Iris Award, a new book prize for outstanding work at the intersection of science/technology, religion, and nature. Her current research focuses on the unearthly ethics and implicit religiosity of Anthropocene-era technologies such as de-extinction and planetary engineering. Lisa is thrilled to join an interdisciplinary community with deep roots in the environmental movement, while maintaining her ties to the study of religion. She looks forward to developing courses that span the environmental humanities, and science, religion, and ethics. As a native Midwesterner, and bird-lover, she is keen to explore the Pacific Coast!
Grace Wu comes to us from The Nature Conservancy and National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis where she was a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow. Prior to that she was a UC President's Postdoctoral fellow at the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis. Grace received her PhD from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley where she discovered the value of interdisciplinary approaches for tackling environmental problems. As an interdisciplinary environmental scientist, Grace uses spatial science approaches to study how to avoid or reduce natural habitat loss due to human land use--specifically from renewable energy development, reforestation as a climate solution, and food production. Her recent research projects have focused on developing land use planning tools to identify and understand the co-benefits and trade-offs between climate solutions, other human land uses, and habitat conservation. She hopes that these efforts enable sustainable, multi-use landscapes that protect biodiversity and natural resources while meeting critical human needs. Grace is thrilled to be joining the Environmental Studies community next summer to help train and diversify the next generation of sustainability scholars and activists. She'll be developing a course on climate solutions that will introduce students to the gamut of mitigation and negative emissions technologies and strategies for tackling climate change. Grace is also looking forward to helping Environmental Studies advance efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in environmental studies with the goal of diversifying environmental leadership and perspectives in order to serve all communities--human and non-human--in need. "