Professor Stacy Alaimo is the Moore Professor in English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She researches and teaches across the environmental humanities, science studies, animal studies, American literature, cultural studies, gender theory, and critical theory, focusing, more specifically, on developing models of new materialism, material feminisms, environmental justice, and, most recently, the blue (oceanic) humanities. Her work explores the intersections between literary, artistic, political, and philosophical approaches to environmentalism along with the practices and experiences of everyday life.
Her publications include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space(Cornell, 2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana 2010), which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment book award for Ecocriticism; and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minnesota 2016). She co-edited Material Feminisms(2008) with Susan J. Hekman, edited the 28-chapter volume Matter (2016) in the Gender series of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, and edited a special volume of Configurations on Science Studies and the Blue Humanities. Dr. Alaimo has published more than 60 scholarly articles, chapters and other essays on such topics as gender and climate change, queer animals, anthropocene feminisms, marine science studies, blue humanities, material ecocriticism, and new materialist theory. Her research has been widely reprinted and translated into at least 13 languages; it has inspired art exhibitions, artworks, architecture, a Portuguese play, and a Greek queer zine. She has written for many art exhibition catalogs and given talks at festivals, such as the FIBER festival in Amsterdam, and has been featured on several podcasts. Her concept of “transcorporeality” has been widely taken up in the arts, humanities, and sciences-- featured, for example, as a topic in The Posthuman Glossary, and the focus of an art exhibit in Cologne, Germany. She is currently co-editing a book series, “Elements,” with Nicole Starosielski and Courtney Berger for Duke University Press. Her new book is The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life (2025) with University of Minnesota Press, in the Posthumanities series. She is working on several new projects, including an essay, "New Materialism and its Discontents," and a new book, Acid Seas: Saturated Species, Extinction Horizons, Elemental Dissolves.
More on her research can be found here:https://www.stacyalaimo.com.
In her previous position as Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, Dr. Alaimo won numerous teaching and graduate mentoring awards. She also worked to develop campus sustainability and academic programs in environmental studies, by serving as the Academic co-chair for the President’s Sustainability Committee and establishing and directing a cross-disciplinary minor in environmental and sustainability studies. Her service to the larger profession includes chairing the inaugural MLA Forum on Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities, judging for the MLA book awards, serving on the international evaluation team for the massive MISTRAS/FORMAS Environmental Humanities program competition in Stockholm, and serving as the Co-President of ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. At UO she served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English from Fall 2022 to Fall 2025, and served on the Dean's Advisory Committee for CAS during AY 24/25, the the Faculty Personnel Committee before that.
