Robert Marzec

Ph.D., Binghamton University, 2000

Specialization

Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial Ecologies, Biodiversity & Environmental Justice, Environmental Ethics, Postcolonial Literature, Environmental Literature, Critical Theory

Robert Marzec is a professor of environmental and postcolonial studies. He received his PhD in English from Binghamton University in 2000 and joined the English Department at Purdue in 2007. He has affiliations with the Center for the Environment, the Institute for Sustainable Futures, the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS), and the Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) program.

Marzec is an interdisciplinary postcolonial ecologist who specializes in bridging the natural and social sciences with the humanities. He partners with faculty across campus to address issues such as climate change, biodiversity conservation, and environmental justice. He is co-founder and co-coordinator of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies (ESS) certificate, an initiative that brings faculty together from the College of Agriculture, the College of Engineering, the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Science, and the College of Health and Human Sciences. He is a convener for Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future Special Initiative: Imagining a Sustainable Future—Coupling Imagination and Research Across the Humanities, the Natural Sciences, and the Social Sciences. And he is a faculty affiliate for Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES), College of Agriculture. His work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Purdue University.

He is the author of Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State (Minnesota 2015), An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature (Palgrave 2007), the editor of Postcolonial Literary Studies: the First 30 Years (Johns Hopkins 2011), and the editor of the journal MFS Modern Fiction Studies. He has published articles in boundary 2, Radical History Review, Public Culture, Postmodern Culture, The Global South, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. He is currently working on a documentary about the 2021 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, and a monograph on biodiversity. Marzec is also an active musician and composer.