Nicole Seymour
Professor
Biography
Nicole Seymour works in the environmental humanities, asking how literature and other cultural forms – from documentary film to standup comedy – mediate our relationship to environmental crisis. Before coming to CSUF, she held positions at the University of Louisville, the University of Arkansas, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her first monograph, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, won the 2015 scholarly book award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Her second, Bad Environmentalism: Affect and Dissent in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), recuperates irreverent and anti-sentimental expressions of environmentalism and was recognized by the Chicago Review of Books as among the “Best Nature Writing of 2018.” Her latest book is Glitter, an environmental-cultural history of that substance from Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series. Dr. Seymour enjoys working with students on research and public activism projects such as Climate Change Theatre Action.
Degrees
2008, Ph.D, English Literature, Vanderbilt University
2004, M.A., English Literature, Vanderbilt University
2001, B.A. summa cum laude, American Literature and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles
Research Areas
Contemporary Anglophone literature, culture, and media; environmental humanities/ecocriticism; gender and sexuality studies; queer theory; affect theory.
Courses Regularly Taught
Analysis of Literary Forms, Literature and the Environment, Landscape in American Literature, Graduate Seminar: Problems in Criticism.
Publications
Seymour, Nicole. “The Greenhouse in the Bathhouse: Ecosexuality and the Legacy of Libertine Botany.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 62, no. 4, 2022, pp. 160–75, https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2022.0050.
Juno Salazar Parreñas, and Nicole Seymour. “Afterword: Ecological Inqueeries.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 14, no. 3, 2022, pp. 718-, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962992.
Seymour, Nicole, and Laura Wright. “Satire: The (Im)Possibilities of Vegan Satire.” The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, pp. 267–77, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474493321-022.
Seymour, Nicole. “Plastic Ambivalence.” Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn. Edited by Susanne Lettow and Sabine Nessel. Routledge, 2022.
Seymour, Nicole. “Junk Food for Thought: Decolonizing Diets in Tommy Pico’s Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment. Ed. Sarah Ensor and Susan Scott Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 120–132. Print. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
Boast, Hannah, et al. “Captive Audiences: Quarantining with Tiger King.” Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, 1st ed., Routledge, 2022, pp. 9–27, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003157205-2.
Pierrot, Briggetta, and Nicole Seymour. “Contemporary cli-fi and indigenous futurisms.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, vol. 9, no. 4, 2020, pp. 92–113, https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2020.9.4.92.
Office Hours
Fall 2025
To be announced
