Professor Mei Mei Evans has taught college English for twenty-five years –over half of them at APU. Her scholarly work is interdisciplinary, leading her to co-edit an academic anthology, “The Environmental Justice Reader” and to publish articles addressing the intersection of nature and culture. Evans’s novel, “Oil and Water,” based on true-life events of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska, was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize in 2012.
Recently, Evans has turned her scholarly and creative focus to educating about climate change. She’s currently teaching a humanities course at APU entitled “Climate Change Goes to the Movies.” Students in the class screen feature-length films together and discuss –not the science of global warming—but what the films suggest about the cultural response to the climatic transformations Earth is undergoing.
Evans’s essay addressing this topic, “This Is What Happens When,” will be published in an anthology forthcoming from Routledge.
In March, the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Environmental Studies program at Humboldt State University in California jointly sponsored Evans’s visit to the campus. In addition to a public talk, Evans visited classes for which her novel, “Oil and Water,” and her essay “ ’Nature’ and Environmental Justice” were assigned reading.
