BIO
Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair of Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Previously an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (1999-2004) and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University (2009-2012), she has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012) and served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (2011). Heise has held visiting positions at numerous universities and is currently the International Francqui Professor Chair at Ghent University in Belgium.
Among her book publications are Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (Suhrkamp, 2010) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Among her editorial appointments, she is co-editor (with Chi P. Pham) of Environment and Narrative in Vietnam with Palgrave Macmillan, February 2024, editor of the series Natures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave, co-editor of the Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2016) and managing editor of Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline (2017), as well as a former co-editor of the Routledge series Literature and Contemporary Thought.
Heise is also co-editor of The Longman Anthology of World Literature. The Twentieth Century; and author of numerous articles and chapters of literary studies on central figures of modernity, as well as writing the introduction and notes to a 2005 edition of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.
A co-founder of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), she is also a producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created in collaboration with U.S. public TV station KCET-Link.