About

Ursula K. Heise holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is co-founder and current Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities; contemporary environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Vietnam; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave. She is also producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary on urban parrots created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link. Her most recent book, a co-edited essay collection on Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, will be published in 2023. She is currently at work on a book entitled “Reclaiming Ecotopia: Science Fiction and Environmental Futures.”

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Ecology
• Philosophy
• Environmental ethics
• Social Science
• Law
• Biology
• Archaeology
• Linguistics
• Art
• Literature
• Gender studies
• History
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Anthropology
• Geography

Selected publications

• Introduction: Environment and Narrative in Vietnam

  Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Environment and Narrative in Vietnam

  Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment · 2024-01-01 · 6 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Conservation Humanities and Multispecies Justice

  Humanities · 2024-03-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article argues that biodiversity conservation is primarily a social and cultural issue and only secondarily a scientific one. It explains the proxy logic of narratives about endangered species, which typically serve as proxies for community identities and the changes communities have undergone through processes of modernization and colonization. Polar bears, whose endangerment is interpreted differently by North American and European audiences, on the one hand, and by Inuit communities, on the other, serve as an example of how endangered species narratives not only involve culture but also, more specifically, issues of multispecies justice. Conservation humanities needs to engage with the two central problems that multispecies justice has identified and grappled with: conflicts between the interests of disadvantaged human communities and nonhuman species and conflicts and trade-offs between the interests of different nonhuman species. The essay argues that adopting the framework of “multispecies justice” rather than “conservation” will help to overcome some of the impasses of interdisciplinary collaboration in environmental studies in the past.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Frontmatter

  Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie · 2024-04-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Novela negra, ciencia ficción y futuros climáticos

  Theory Now Journal of Literature Critique and Thought · 2024-07-30 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Este ensayo explora los retos narrativos de la ficción climática con respecto a escalas temporales, espaciales y sociales. Tras una breve discusión teórica, el ensayo se centra en el género de la "novela negra" en combinación con la ciencia ficción como estrategia narrativa específica para la ficción climática. Se analizan dos novelas españolas sobre el cambio climático, El secreto del agua de Arturo Arnau Tarín (2007) y 2065 de José Miguel Gallardo (2017), en comparación con la novela estadounidense The Water Knife de Paolo Bacigalupi (2015), con el objetivo de demostrar los beneficios y las dificultades de adaptar un género literario establecido al tema del cambio climático.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Frontmatter

  Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie · 2023-11-28

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• :<i>How Nature Matters: Culture, Identity, and Environmental Value</i>

  The Quarterly Review of Biology · 2023-11-07

  review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie · 2023

  • Philosophy
  • Linguistics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Frontmatter

  Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie · 2023-09-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Urban Narrative and the Futures of Biodiversity

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Cities have traditionally been neglected settings in environmental writing and ecologically oriented literary criticism, but have played a central role in the thought and writings of the environmental justice movement. Recently, they have also come into focus as “novel ecosystems” of their own in fiction and nonfiction. This chapter surveys two thematic emphases in environmental literature that portrays cities at risk from either toxicity or climate change, both of which continue to emphasize the antagonism between urban landscapes and the forces of nature by describing cities as either sources or targets of environmental risk. It then focuses on a third and less explored approach to the city as a multispecies community to outline four recurrent templates: the awareness narrative in which individuals or communities discover urban species; the narrative of urban return in which wild species reclaim the city; narratives about cities as sites of newly emergent species through evolution or technological modification; and narratives of urban bonds between humans and nonhumans. All of these narratives shift the emphasis from the city as an ecological wasteland to a new understanding of novel urban ecosystems and novel biological habitats that need to be understood in terms of multispecies justice.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Olga Fischer

  University of New Hampshire

  66 shared

• Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

  Advisory Board Company (United States)

  66 shared

• Martin Puchner

  Walter de Gruyter (Germany)

  66 shared

• Elisabeth Bronfen

  66 shared

• Philip Durkin

  Walter de Gruyter (Germany)

  66 shared

• Terttu Nevalainen

  University of Helsinki

  66 shared

• Martin Middeke

  66 shared

• Liliane Louvel

  Université Paris Cité

  65 shared

Education

• Ph.D., English

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1990

• M.A., English

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1986

• B.A., English

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1983

Awards & honors

• 2011 Guggenheim Fellow
• 6th Biophilia Award for pushing forward the field of Environ…
• BBVA Foundation’s 6th Biophilia Award for pushing forward th…