Ursula Heise

Los Angeles

Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. 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. 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 Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 and served as President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment the same year. She is also a co-founder of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), and producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link (2018).