Roy Scranton
Director of Creative Writing
Associate Professor
Director, Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM)
Areas of study
- American
- Creative Writing
- Environmental
- Postcolonial/Global
Education
Ph.D., English, Princeton University
M.A., Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research
B.A., Liberal Arts, New School University
Research and teaching interests
Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial Anthropocene Studies, War Literature, The Novel, Literary Journalism and the Essay, 20th-Century American Literature, Experimental Writing
Biography
Dr. Roy Scranton is an essayist, novelist, literary critic, and climate philosopher, best known for his work on war, war literature, and the Anthropocene. He is the author of five books, and has written widely for publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone, MIT Technology Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Dr. Scranton grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college, and spent his early twenties wandering the American West. He served four years in the US Army (2002–2006), including fourteen months in Iraq, then completed his bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, before earning a Ph.D. in English at Princeton.
His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, and held the inaugural Teaching Lab Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
Dr. Scranton is the founding director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM).
Representative publications
- I ♥ Oklahoma! (Soho Press, 2019)
- Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
- We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018)
- War Porn (Soho Press, 2016)
- Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights Books, 2015)
