Dr. Marta Werbanowska

My research and teaching interests include African American and Caribbean literatures with a focus on poetry, poetics of social and environmental/climate justice, Environmental Humanities, and Black Studies. I am currently working on my first book project, tentatively titled Vital Necessity: Ecological Thinking in Contemporary Black Poetry.

As a scholar of African American literature and ecopoetics, I am guided by the intellectual principles of Black Studies and Environmental Humanities in my exploration of the intertwined ecological and humanitarian crises of today. More specifically, I am interested in how contemporary African American literature draws from Black diasporic traditions of ecological thinking to propose sustainable and socially just practices of daily life and political action in the twenty-first century. My approach to Black writing draws from African American and Caribbean literary histories, intellectual and folk traditions of the Black Atlantic, African cosmologies, as well as methodologies of ecocriticism and ecopoetics, critical posthumanism, and new materialism. While my background is primarily in literary studies, my research reflects the interdisciplinary commitments of Black Studies and Environmental Humanities.