ursula k. heise

Ursula K. Heise

Professor | Chair of the English Department | Interim Director, Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS)

Department of English

149 Humanities Building
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Campus Mailcode: 1530

+ 1 415.425.9174

Ursula K. Heise is the Chair of the Department of English and professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and former President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory.

She is editor of the series Natures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave, and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is co-editor of the forthcoming 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). Her books include 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 (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010) and, just out, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

She is also a co-founder of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) and producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles (www.kcet.org/urbanark), a documentary created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link.

Projects

Multicolored_tanager_chicoral

Sustainable tourism in Colombia: Biocultural values

“No Music Without Trees or Birds: A Spatial Analysis of Cultural Reliance and Relationships to Endemic Flora and Fauna Species in Colombia” Pritzker Award Affiliate: Alejandra Echeverri, Conservation Scientist, Stanford…

la 2050

LA 2050

A team of LENS-affiliated faculty and graduate students at UCLA has begun work on a creative film project that explores possible eco-futures for Los Angeles. Led by Professors Ursula K.…

lens magazine

LENS Magazine

LENS Magazine, hosted on Medium.com,  is home to essays, photography & art, criticism, stories, theory & practice and interviews curated by the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Medium.com is…

urban biodiversity: cultures, stories, taxonomies

Urban Biodiversity: Cultures, Stories, Taxonomies

Cities have recently begun to attract the attention of ecologists and biologists as ecosystems whose functioning is not as yet well understood. Urban ecosystems combine ecological processes with social practices…

holoscenes/anthroposcene suite 1 by lars jan

Holoscenes/Anthroposcene Suite 1 by Lars Jan

Holoscenes is a multi-platform artwork colliding the human body with water. The work includes performance installation, video, photographic, and print components. The Anthropocene Suite is a quartet of projections featuring…

Publications