In “Let Them Drown,” the 2016 London Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein called attention, as Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor had done, to the nexus of climate change, (colonial) racism and poverty. But she shifted the spotlight onto the oft-overlooked low-lying island nations. Their current day situation is dire. In her new book project, Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise Professor Christina Gerhardt combines cartography and geography, literary studies and creative non-fiction, and environmental studies and environmental humanities to present the current climate change induced impacts on low lying islands and the solutions being put forward to them, often by the indigenous inhabitants of the islands themselves.
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Christina Gerhardt is Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, Film and German Studies at the University of Hawaii. She is Associate Editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). She is the author of Atlas of (Remote) Islands and Sea Level Rise and the editor of Climate Change, Hawaii and the Pacific.
She is also an environmental journalist, covering the annual UN climate negotiations, renewable energy and related legislation and direct action. This writing has been published under “Tina Gerhardt” in venues such as ClimateProgress.org, grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive and the Washington Monthly.
Professor Gerhardt has held fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin and Columbia University and taught previously at the University of California at Berkeley.
Her writing has been published in the journals Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Cineaste, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, German Studies Review, Humanities, Mosaic, New German Critique and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and in the edited volumes My Ocean Guide and Water: An Atlas.
