Wojciech Malecki is university professor of literary theory at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. His research is situated at the intersections of the humanities and social sciences exploring the impact of literature and the media on society, in particular on public attitudes toward the environment. It has been published in Poetics, ISLE, PLOS One, and other journals, featured in the media, including in The New York Times, Newsweek, and Psychology Today, and translated into Chinese, Swedish, and other languages. His most recent books are Human Minds and Animal Stories: How Narratives Make Us Care About Other Species (Routledge 2019), What Can We Hope For? (Princeton UP 2022), and Empirical Ecocriticism (U of Minnesota P, forthcoming in 2023). He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, The Free University of Berlin as well as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, and other institutions. He is currently leading a National Science Center-funded project on the social influence of climate fiction. (Photo: Alina Metelytsia)
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is Associate Professor of English at Colby College. His wide-ranging research combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and sociology to examine the cultural dimensions of climate change, with a focus on climate justice. He has published articles and book chapters on literature, popular culture, environmental futures, and environmental politics, in the United States, Singapore, and China, in journals such as Climatic Change, Environmental Politics, Environmental Communication, Environmental Humanities, American Quarterly, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is the author of Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture, editor of Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore, and co-editor of An Ecotopian Lexicon and the forthcoming Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change. His research has been covered by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, El País, The Straits Times, Taiwan News, Grist, and other news sites.