About the author

Jenn Ladino joined the English Department at the University of Idaho in 2010, on the heels of a Fulbright Lecturing position at the University of Bergen, Norway (2009-10) and three years as an assistant professor at Creighton University. Her first book Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2012) traces a genealogy of nostalgia for nature in American literature and culture since 1890. It was shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s (ASLE) Best Ecocriticism Book award. Her second monograph, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (University of Nevada Press, 2019), explores the impacts of the physical environment on tourists’ emotions at National Park Service sites in the U.S. West. Jenn also co-edited, with Kyle Bladow, Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). 

Jenn has published articles in Fire; Emotion, Space, and Society; Environmental Humanities; Resilience; Western American Literature; Twentieth Century Literature; and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, among other peer-reviewed journals. She has also written chapters for books on climate justice, labor in the Anthropocene, aesthetic imaginaries, and other subjects. She is currently at work on an edited collection of essays called Experiencing War Memorials: Place, Feeling, and Public Memory. Most of these writing projects grew in some way out of Jenn’s thirteen summers working as a seasonal park ranger in Grand Teton National Park. 

At the University of Idaho, Jenn teaches courses on American literature, including contemporary rural and U.S. West literatures; the environmental humanities; climate change fiction and film; and emotion and affect theory. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab, which uses interdisciplinary methods to study environmental issues in rural communities. With her Confluence Lab collaborators, Jenn has received major grants from the National Science Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. She has also been awarded a Fulbright Lectureship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. She is the former Vice President for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and a past President of the Western Literature Association.

Checklist

We started that class with an environmental privilege checklist adapted from Peggy McIntosh’s classic white privilege “knapsack” exercise. One brave Latinx student shared a story about being racially profiled in Southern California, and that opened up a conversation about how the checklist presumes, and risks recentering, a white reader. Interestingly, very few of my students found their experiences represented in the checklist, likely because of the class privilege it highlights. The list may presume a white audience, but its attempt to raise awareness of class privilege seems effective when that is, indeed, the audience involved. I’d like to do more next time by way of identifying and critiquing the objects of care embedded in the list—public parks, local produce, wilderness areas, and more—and comparing them to our own, perhaps by way of a “mind map” exercise, such as the “mind map of ecological emotions” (see Pihkala’s chapter in this volume).

• For further information on the checklist, please visit this link.

Excepts from the chapter

"Fear might be a catalyst for longer-term, low-grade worry that—when tied to objects of care—can motivate action."

"I remind my students frequently that the word emotion carries, etymologically, a connotation of movement and agitation; in a sense, emotions are always “anxious” or unsettling. But we are each unsettled by different triggers, and in different ways, depending on our positionality, including aspects of privilege. Many inhabitants of North Idaho are not yet registering the effects of climate change as intensely and urgently as people in other places. Many of my students have been relatively insulated from the climate anxiety others feel constantly. But that seems to be changing, perhaps due in part to the new summer normal of constant wildfires and apocalyptic smoke—conditions that feel, as the young man in Coeur d’Alene said, scary."

"As more Americans in particular express worry, concern, and alarm, let’s not dismiss, reduce, or pathologize these feelings but rather couple them with self-reflexivity, a sense of efficacy, and opportunities for collective action."

Contact details

Jenn is interested in speaking to live audiences. You can contact her via this email.