Keynote Speakers

Adeline Johns Putra (Online Keynote Session)

Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor and Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, and a Visiting Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, and she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National University in 2012. She was President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) from 2011 to 2015. She has published widely in the field of climate fiction studies, including her monograph Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019); edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate (with Kelly Sultzbach, 2022), Climate and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Cli-Fi: A Companion (with Axel Goodbody, Peter Lang, 2018), and Literature and Sustainability (with John Parham and Louise Squire, Manchester University Press, 2017); and articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in the Novel, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Alexa Weik von Mossner (Online Keynote Session)

Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, and currently a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her interdisciplinary research explores American environmental culture from a cognitive ecocritical perspective with special attention to affect and emotion, combining theoretical and empirical approaches. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (U of Texas P 2014) and Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP 2017), the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), and the co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (Winter 2014), Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology (Routledge 2022), and Empirical Ecocriticism (U of Minnesota P, 2023). She recently finished Growing Hope: Narratives of Food Justice, a short book under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Ayşe Lahur Kırtunç

Ayşe Lahur Kırtunç received her BA and MA degrees from Hacettepe University, Department of English Language and Literature and her PhD from Ankara University, Department of American Culture and Literature. She has worked at Middle East Technical University, Dokuz Eylul University and Ege University where she was the head of the Department of American Culture and Literature between 2000 and 2007. She was a Fulbright Research Grant recipient during the years 1975-76 (University of San Francisco) and 1996-97 (University of Texas at Austin). Her areas of interest are gender studies, popular culture and cultural theory. She was the editor of Journal of American Studies of Turkey between 2002-2007. Also, she was the founder (1995) and organizer for many years of Ege University Cultural Studies Symposium. She is currently working on enforced population exchange, migration and refugee movements. She is a farmer who has been  experimenting with organic, sustainable farming for the last 25 years.

Scott Slovic

Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities Emeritus at the University of Idaho. He is currently Senior Scientist at the Oregon Research Institute, where he uses empirical approaches to study audience responses to environmental texts. His many publications include the recent coedited volumes Nature and Literary Studies and The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities. He previously served as the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and as editor-in-chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Ufuk Özdağ

Ufuk Özdağ is Professor of American Culture and Literature; and Founder-Director of the Land Ethic Research and Application Center at Hacettepe University, Ankara. Özdağ specializes in American nature writing, ecocriticism, and comparative studies of the environmental literatures of the U.S. and Turkey. Özdağ is the author of Literature and the Land Ethic: Leopoldian Thought in American Nature Writing (2005) and Introduction to Environmental Criticism: Nature, Culture, Literature (2014), both in Turkish. She is the co-editor of The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (2011), Environmental Crisis and Human Costs (2015), Anadolu Turnaları: Biyoloji, Kültür, Koruma (Anatolian Cranes: Biology, Culture, Conservation) (2019), and Nature v/s Culture (2022). Özdağ is the translator of Aldo Leopold’s conservation classic A Sand County Almanac (2013), and the co-translator of Edward Abbey’s seminal work Desert Solitaire (2019) into Turkish. Özdağ has initiated and has been offering “literature and environment” and “environmental studies” courses at Hacettepe University for fifteen years. As a “land ethic leader” (Aldo Leopold Foundation’s LEL graduate 2010), Özdağ is pioneering efforts in land restoration at Hacettepe’s Beytepe Campus.

Christopher Volpe 

Christopher Volpe is an artist, educator, and independent scholar with degrees from Stony Brook University and the University of New Hampshire, USA. His essay The Art of Climate Change: Contemporary Artists Respond to Global Crisis, published in Zygon, the journal of the Institute of Religion in an Age of Science, was the publication’s most downloaded essay in 2020. He has taught art history at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, Chester College of New England, and Franklin Pierce University. His paintings often incorporate unusual materials such as tar, ash, salt, earth, rust, and gold leaf for their poetic and political overtones. Grants and awards include the Saint Botolph Club Foundation, MassMoCA/Assets for Artists, and the NH State Council on the Arts. 

His work can be viewed online at www.christophervolpe.com.