Professor Christina Gerhardt’s book earns ecocritical award

Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, written by Christina Gerhardt, Henry J. Leir Endowed Chair and Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Culture, has won the 2025 Ecocritical Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. The winners of the 2025 ASLE Book Awards were announced on July 9 at the Authors and Awards Reception at the Sixteenth ASLE Biennial Conference at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Judges’ comments:

• A stunning and powerful book, Gerhardt’s Sea Change pushes the boundaries of what any critical study or collection in the environmental humanities might accomplish. It pairs a powerful range of primary sources — poems, essays, and statements written by littoral people around the world — with incisive critical essays that index a huge range of critical sources and bring them to bear in exploring the precarious position of Islanders, islands, and their ecologies across the planet.
• This is a strikingly original and beautifully produced book that expands the formal and conceptual bounds of ecocritical scholarship. Gerhardt performs the impressive feat of combining a strong command of the underlying science with both a deep appreciation of island cultures and a commitment to accessible and engaging writing.
• This is a stunningly beautiful book, not a volume that one would read through but one to peruse over time, leaving open pauses for reflection. It is indeed an atlas, of the world ocean’s dozens and dozens of islands — most inhabited, some uninhabitable — which are presented to us in all their local diversities, both natural and cultural. Every one of them is threatened by sea level rise.

The awards, in the categories of ecocriticism and environmental creative writing, were established in 2007 and have been given biennially to recognize excellence in the field.