News

Ursula Heise, a pioneer in the field of environmental humanities, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies.

Heise, a distinguished professor of English and member of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, examines important ecological topics like extinction, species endangerment and wildlife conservation through the lens of culture and media.

As co-founder and director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, or LENS, she focuses on cross-disciplinary research that explores how storytelling — through literature, films, journalism, video games and other platforms — can influence not just what we know about the environment but how we act on it.

Importantly, Heise puts those ideas into practice, collaborating with students and colleagues to tell the story of our planet through inventive projects like “Urban Ark Los Angeles,” a documentary exploring the world of endangered red-crowned parrots in a city setting, and  “Grand Theft Eco,” a series of animated films that turned a well-known video game into a vehicle for environmental awareness.

“A lot of my work over the last 30 years has focused on developing the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, which researches how environmental crises are shaped by different languages, cultures and histories,” Heise said. “I’ve been particularly interested in how different environmentalisms engage with scales of place and time, and how narratives across a variety of media shape communities’ relationship to other species. Environmental justice and multispecies studies —  especially the question of how we might think about justice and diplomacy in relation to nonhuman species — have been central to this research.”

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Photo courtesy of Ursula Heise.