Cymene Howe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and a core faculty member in the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. She is the author of Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke 2013), co-editor of 21st Century Sexualities (Routledge 2009) and has published numerous articles and book chapters in anthropology and transdisciplinary texts. In a multi-year collaborative research project with Dominic Boyer in Southern Mexico she has followed the political and social contingencies of renewable energy development, paying special attention to the material, multi-species and political/ecological effects of wind power as well as the ethical questions its turbulence inspires. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (forthcoming Cornell 2016) will be published as a duograph—a parallel-authored, dialogic text, printed to read in two directions. Her work on renewable energy transitions in Mexico analyzed the role of “mitigation” strategies in forestalling further anthropogenic harms to the earth’s aqua-, litho-, bio- and atmospheres; her current research concerns “adaptations” to climate change. Melt: The Social Life of Ice at the Top of the World, her next project, seeks to understand cryohuman interrelations and the implications of the metamorphosis of ice in Iceland. In this work and others, she is committed to thinking through how ecological authority is constituted as well as how anthropogenic climate change calls for new ways of imagining our collective biotic and material futures. She currently serves as a member of the editorial collective of Cultural Anthropology and as co-editor of the Johns Hopkins Guide to Social Theory.
Dominic Boyer is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS, culturesofenergy.org), the first research center in the world designed specifically to promote research on the energy/environment nexus in the arts, humanities and social sciences. He is part of the editorial collective of the journal Cultural Anthropology (2015-2018) and also edits Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge, a book series for Cornell University Press. His research interests include media, knowledge, energy and power. His most recent monograph is The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era (Cornell University Press, 2013). With James Faubion and George Marcus, he has recently edited, Theory can be more than it used to be (Cornell University Press 2015) and with Imre Szeman is preparing Energy Humanities: A Reader for Johns Hopkins University Press. His next book project is a collaborative multimedia duograph with Cymene Howe, which explores the energopolitical complexities of wind power development in Southern Mexico. With Timothy Morton, he is currently developing a project for the Open Humanities Press, tentatively titled, Hyposubjects: Politics of the Ecological Emergency (Human Language Edition). He is also developing an energy humanities podcast through CENHS to further diversify the vectors of scholarly and artistic work in this emergent field.
