Ursula Heise

University of California, Los Angeles, English, Faculty Member

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Address: Department of English
149 Humanities Building, Box 951530
University of California
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530

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University of Notre Dame (Australia)

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Universität Leipzig

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Kapadokya Üniversitesi

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Kansas State University

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University of Texas at Dallas

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City University of Hong Kong

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University of Salamanca

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Duke University

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Stanford University

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Papers by Ursula Heise

The Longman anthology of world literature

... David Damrosch David L. Pike General Editors ... Instructor&#x27;s Manual to accompany Th... more

Multispecies Futures and the Study of Culture

Futures of the Study of Culture, 2020

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Multispecies Justice in the Wetlands

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

This essay discusses the rise of "justice" as a central concept around which envi... more This essay discusses the rise of "justice" as a central concept around which environmental thought and debates have been organized over the last thirty years, and briefly places the notions of environmental justice and multispecies justice into the more general context of theories of justice since John Rawls. It uses the case of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve in Los Angeles, whose future is hotly contested between different environmentalist groups, as a case study to illustrate the complex trade-offs that environmental decision-making currently confronts, and to suggest in what ways the invocation of multispecies justice changes the participants in the community of justice and the way in which their claims on humans' moral consideration should be weighed.

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Comparative Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

Ecocriticism started out in the early 1990s in the framework of American literary studies - in th... more Ecocriticism started out in the early 1990s in the framework of American literary studies - in the Anglo sense that equates "America" with the "United States." In fact, the new field's first professional organization, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, was founded as an offshoot of academic interest focused on a particular region of the United States, in the backroom of a casino in Reno, Nevada, during the 1992 annual convention of the Western Literature Association. During its first decade, the bulk of ecocritical attention focused on American literature as shaped by Thoreau and British literature as shaped by Wordsworth - a limited but powerful concentration on nature writing in the genres of poetry, nonfiction prose, and the noveI, with particular attention to Native American literature. By the turn of the millennium, in a story that has by now been told repeatedly, interest in the literature-environment nexus had grown and di...

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Biocities: urban ecology and the cultural imagination

Worth more than 1000 words: How photographs can bolster viewers’ valuing of biodiversity

Many individuals struggle to see, comprehend, and care about the planet’s accelerating loss of bi... more Many individuals struggle to see, comprehend, and care about the planet’s accelerating loss of biodiversity. Scholars suggest that the impact of declining biodiversity remains emotionally and psychologically distant—similar to how many perceive climate change. Yet, because people see representations of species and habitats routinely throughout their daily lives, carefully selected images could make this issue feel less psychologically distant and/or more emotionally resonant. Leveraging photos that underscored the idea of “costs” within an expectancy-value theory framework, we tested a combination of preregistered and exploratory hypotheses through an online experiment (N = 843). Our goals were to understand whether viewing photographs of plants and animals (with and without captions) bolstered people’s valuing of biodiversity and willingness to donate to a nature-focused charity relative to a control group. Participants who viewed photographs (without captions) valued biodiversity ...

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Developing a Sense of Planet: Ecocriticism and Globalisation

Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies, 2012

From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, explorations of contemporary society and culture in the humaniti... more From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, explorations of contemporary society and culture in the humanities and social sciences were centrally organised around the category of ‘postmodernism’. While this term was often attacked for its inherent vagueness or the multiplicity of its meanings, it helped to focus discussions about the legacies of modernity as a social, political and economic set of structures, and about the legacies of Modernism, understood as a particular set of aesthetic practices dominant between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century.1 Such explorations of what followed ‘the modern’ in society and in the arts continue, of course, but from the mid-1990s onward, analyses of contemporary culture have tended to shift to ‘globalisation’ as their key organising term. On the surface, this concept, in its predominantly geopolitical and economic implications, seems to share little in common with postmodernism as a term with mostly cultural and aesthetic ramifications. Yet some of the fundamental questions that both concepts serve to highlight are quite similar: what are the legacies of the modern? Does globalisation mean the global spread of a European and North American-based style of modernisation, or are there different paths toward and beyond modernisation?

Developing a Sense of Planet

Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2013

For an early, eighth-century b.c.e. example of actual spatial segregation by way of a partition w... more For an early, eighth-century b.c.e. example of actual spatial segregation by way of a partition wall that, in fact, predates the alleged ideological change by roughly three centuries, see Henan Xinyang Diqu Wenguanhui 河南信陽地區文管會 and Guangshan Xian Wenguanhui 光山縣文管會, "Chunqiu zaoqi Huang Junmeng fufu mu fajue baogao" 春秋早期黃君孟夫婦墓發掘報告, Kaogu 考古, 1984.4 [April 1984], pp. 302-332, 348. 6-For the respective bibliographic references, see note 2 above. 7-For references to the respective excavation reports as well as a brief discussion of the silk banners found at Yinqueshan and Jinqueshan, see Annette Kieser, "Das Gräberfeld von Linyi,

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Remapping English

Key words: topography, literary canon, environmental writing, visual media, Digital Humanities &n... more Key words: topography, literary canon, environmental writing, visual media, Digital Humanities  Ecocriticism to date has not changed the basic method of inquiry in literary studies nor has it remapped the canon in terms of genre. Rather than focus on the canonical literary genres, ecocriticism could have emphasized research on popular scientific texts and travel narratives that have generated far more public attention and debate. Likewise, relatively little research is devoted to other visual media such as film and photography which have also received large public attention. Moreover, there are many biological and ecological concepts which remain ill-defined in science and offer the possibility of exploration in terms of what cultural assumptions contribute to their definitions, uses, translations and reception. Thus ecocriticism needs a re-engagement with biological and ecological sciences which would challenge the conventions of literary and cultural studies. Palabras cl...

Seeing is Believing: Effects of Photos and Captions on Valuing of Biodiversity

16. 1970, Planet Earth: The Imagination of the Global

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jun 28, 2006

Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Cultures of Extinction

Configurations, 2010

:Humankind is currently confronted with what some biologists call the sixth mass extinction of sp... more :Humankind is currently confronted with what some biologists call the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, and the first one triggered by humans. This essay places the narrative that usually accompanies scientific accounts of biodiversity loss in relation to the long tradition of environmentalist stories about the decline of nature. It demonstrates how elegiac

The Vanishing Metropolis

Post-Global Aesthetics

Since its emergence in the 1960s and 70s, the modern environmental movement has been fertile grou... more Since its emergence in the 1960s and 70s, the modern environmental movement has been fertile ground for the imagination, re-imagination, and counterimagination of globalisms and globalization. Environmental movements, in the plural; struggles for the conservation of naturehave never been cut of one cloth across different regions, languages, and cultures. Some strands of environmentalism have emphasized the urgency and necessity of global perspectives: from René Dubos' slogan "Think globally, act locally" and the adoption of the 'Blue Marble' image produced by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 to Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and contemporary activism around climate change, planet Earth in its entirety and the more abstract concept of "planetarity" have been central figures of thought for environmentalism. Planetarity, understood as a counter-term to globalization, approaches Earth as "an undivided 'natural' space rather than a differentiated political space" (Spivak 2003: 72). To the extent that environmentalism seeks to understand the interconnectedness of planetary ecological systems, processes, and crises, it continues to be fundamentally invested in certain types of globalism. The highly influential notion of the Anthropocene, proposed as a new geological era of pervasive human influence on global ecosystems by the scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), continues this kind of thinking about planet Earth in its entirety. This understanding, however, has often entered into complex and sometimes contradictory combinations with commitments to localities, bioregions, or nations 1. From the association of indigenous identities with particular territories in the Americas and Australia to the call for a "sense of place" as an indispensable prerequisite for environmental ethics in the North American environmentalist movement, localisms have played a central role in conflicts over the uses and

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The Planetary Futures of Eco-Apocalypse

Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture

Chronoschisms

Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, 2005

Urban Narrative and the Futures of Biodiversity

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment, 2022

Remapping English

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 1970

Key words: topography, literary canon, environmental writing, visual media, Digital Humanities E... more Key words: topography, literary canon, environmental writing, visual media, Digital Humanities Ecocriticism to date has not changed the basic method of inquiry in literary studies nor has it remapped the canon in terms of genre. Rather than focus on the canonical literary genres, ecocriticism could have emphasized research on popular scientific texts and travel narratives that have generated far more public attention and debate. Likewise, relatively little research is devoted to other visual media such as film and photography which have also received large public attention. Moreover, there are many biological and ecological concepts which remain ill-defined in science and offer the possibility of exploration in terms of what cultural assumptions contribute to their definitions, uses, translations and reception. Thus ecocriticism needs a re-engagement with biological and ecological sciences which would challenge the conventions of literary and cultural studies. Palabras clave: topog...

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Afterword: Environmentalism, Eco-Cosmopolitanism, and Premodern Thought

Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination, 2019

Comparative literature and the environmental humanities

The Longman anthology of world literature

... David Damrosch David L. Pike General Editors ... Instructor&#x27;s Manual to accompany Th... more

Multispecies Futures and the Study of Culture

Futures of the Study of Culture, 2020

Download

Multispecies Justice in the Wetlands

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Download

Comparative Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

Download

Biocities: urban ecology and the cultural imagination

Worth more than 1000 words: How photographs can bolster viewers’ valuing of biodiversity

Download

Developing a Sense of Planet: Ecocriticism and Globalisation

Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies, 2012

Developing a Sense of Planet

Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2013

Download

Remapping English

Seeing is Believing: Effects of Photos and Captions on Valuing of Biodiversity

16. 1970, Planet Earth: The Imagination of the Global

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jun 28, 2006

Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Cultures of Extinction

Configurations, 2010

The Vanishing Metropolis

Post-Global Aesthetics

Download

The Planetary Futures of Eco-Apocalypse

Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture

Chronoschisms

Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, 2005

Urban Narrative and the Futures of Biodiversity

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment, 2022

Remapping English

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 1970

Download

Afterword: Environmentalism, Eco-Cosmopolitanism, and Premodern Thought

Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination, 2019

Comparative literature and the environmental humanities

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities

by Ursula Heise and Michelle Niemann

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Ch... more The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, is a collection of 45 essays that reflect on and assess the environmental humanities. The volume brings together work by an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars and writers who address the Anthropocene, domestication, posthumanism, multispecies communities, narratives of decline and resilience, environmental history and memory, literature and ecocriticism, and environmental media, technologies, and art. See the table of contents for a look inside.

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Ursula Heise

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