Christina Gerhardt is the Leir Chair and Professor. She is also the Co-founding Co-Director of the Environmental Humanities at Clark University; former Barron Visiting Professor of Environmental Humanities at the High Meadows Environment Institute at Princeton University (2021-2022); and a former Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center (2022).
Professor Gerhardt is the author or editor of five books including, most recently, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (University of California Press, 2023) named one of the “Best Popular Science Books of 2023” by the New Scientist, called “a work of art” by the LA Times and winner of the 2025 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Book Award for Ecocriticism and the 2023 Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) Michelle Kendrick Book Award Book Award.
She is Editor-in-Chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), published by Oxford University Press. She has served on the Editorial Boards of the PMLA: Publication of the Modern Languages Association, the Journal of Environmental Media and she currently serves on the Editorial Board of Media Energy.
Professor Gerhardt has been awarded grants by the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rachel Carson Center, the DAAD and the Newberry Library. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the Free University Berlin, Columbia University, and the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught previously and is a permanent Senior Fellow.
She is also an environmental journalist focusing on environmental justice and has been published (under “Tina Gerhardt”) in The Guardian, Grist, The Nation, Orion and Sierra Magazine, and
elsewhere.
She is a frequent media commentator and has been interviewed on ABC, Fox and NBC Affiliates and BBC’s World Service, CBC’s The Current Affair, as well as NPR’s 1A, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, among other venues.