Erin James, Ph.D.

Erin James joined the English Department at University of Idaho in 2012. Her first book The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) explores the intersections of ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and narrative theory and questions the role narratives stand to play in a response to today’s environmental crisis. It was shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s (ASLE) Best Ecocriticism Book award and won the International Society for the Study of Narrative’s (ISSN) Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies. Her second book, Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State University Press, 2022), considers the links between storytelling and anthropogenic climate change; it was also short-listed for the ASLE Best Ecocriticism Book Award. In addition to these two books, Erin co-edited Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology (Ohio State University Press, 2022) with Eric Morel.
Erin has also published essays in Cambridge Critical Concepts: Nature and Literary Studies (Cambridge UP, 2023), SubStance, DIEGESIS, Poetics Today, The Language of Plants (U of Minnesota Press 2017), the Journal of Narrative Theory, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, The Bioregional Imagination (U of Georgia P 2012), and Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (Palgrave 2012).
At University of Idaho, Erin teaches courses on world literatures in English, postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities, narratology and narrative theory, and critical theory. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab, which uses interdisciplinary methods to study environmental issues in rural communities. With her Confluence Lab collaborators, Erin has received major grants from the National Science Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. She is the former mentoring program co-coordinator for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and a past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.