Malcolm Sen
Malcolm Sen believes that “the greatest gift of literature is its ability to provoke empathy across distant spaces, and also distant times.” Nowhere is the need for this power more urgent today than in confronting the existential threat of climate change.
As Sen, who is an associate professor in the UMass Amherst Department of English, goes on to explain in a 2017 interview in the Chicago Review of Books, titled, “Why Climate Fiction Matters,” literature about climate change can speak to readers in a way that scientific data about the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its effects on Earth cannot, allowing us to “empathize with [imagined] futures.”
“The way environmental, ecological, and biological issues have been packaged in the contemporary world is actually quite detrimental to the kind of action we need on the climate change front,” Sen says. “Today, it’s the scientists who are turning to the humanists to figure out how we can actually engage the public on this issue and advocate for impactful climate change policies. Neither politics nor economics have the life cycles necessary for the kind of deep historical thinking that questions of ecology raise.”
Sen has been at the forefront of environmental humanities scholarship since the field’s emergence about 20 years ago and has dedicated his career to building coalitions of scientists and humanists to address issues of climate change. The editor of a field-defining volume, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2022), among others, Sen is the author of 20 articles and counting. He has also hosted an Irish podcast series; written in popular publications, most notably The Irish Times; and been interviewed on radio shows, such as The Fabulous 413.
Raised in Kolkata, India, Sen earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of Calcutta. There, he became fascinated by the deep connections between Indian and Irish histories and moved to Ireland to complete a master’s degree, and later a PhD, in Irish literature at University College Dublin. He recalls, “Irish literature is far less ‘white’ than it might appear to be to an American audience. In any case, even while doing my PhD in an English literature department, I was conscious that the story I really wanted to tell was about the connections between ecology, politics, culture, and history. Stories—that very broad term we use when we think of literary study—have always been ecological.”
Sen went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame and served as an Irish Research Council Elevate Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. At the vanguard of the burgeoning environmental humanities field, he was involved in figuring out its vocabularies, methods, and foci of analysis.
Reading texts closely—whether they are literary, critical, scientific, or journalistic in nature—makes us better ecological citizens.
“I believe we are witnessing a critical moment, when ‘interdisciplinarity’ is not simply a buzzword but is really inspiring scholars and students working in disparate fields,” he says. “When it comes to climate change, it’s clear we need to stop fantasizing about quick techno-fixes and scientific solutions that somehow will also address the deep injustices and uneven geography of climate change. Rather, we should mobilize disciplines such as literary, historical, philosophical, and cultural study, which have always thought across generations, and we should aspire to think across geographies.”
Sen adds, “What are such stories if not modes of ecological governance? How can questions of justice be meaningful if they do not center the environment? How can action on climate change be impactful if considerations of justice are not at its core?”
Having lived and studied on three separate continents, Sen additionally brings diverse cultural perspectives to his scholarship. He describes his approach: “How do you think across cultures at a time when we almost need to be planetary human beings? This has always been a part of my intellectual journey.”
At UMass, Sen founded the Environmental Humanities Initiative in the College of the Humanities & Fine Arts and directs the Department of English’s Environmental Humanities Specialization. As an outgrowth of his service on the provost’s Sustainability Strategy Working Group, he successfully applied for a seed grant to establish the Anthropocene Lab. This interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists is working to develop new narratives through research and dialogue about the Anthropocene, the contested geological epoch in which we are currently living. The lab facilitates workshops that draw on creative and critical work in different fields. In March 2024, it hosted a three-day symposium, The Great Melt, in tandem with the International Arctic Workshop.
Sen was also awarded the 2023–24 Distinguished Teaching Award from the UMass Center for Teaching and Learning. His teaching pays special attention to ecological imperialism, racialized and gendered aspects of environmental discourse, and climate politics. His classes are rich in dialogue between humanities and STEM students, who all have an opportunity to enhance their individual critical thinking by robustly engaging with their peers’ unique disciplinary methods.
“I ask my students to confront something that they may not have had much training in or feel unsure about," he says. "More often than not, I find them rising to this challenge. Reading texts closely—whether they are literary, critical, scientific, or journalistic in nature—makes us better ecological citizens; close reading and historicization activate critical thinking processes that are especially necessary to understand the ramifications of climate politics and environmental policies. Our seminars tend to be highly collaborative spaces that ultimately engage in what I think is going to get us out of this mess: community building, which is highly impactful even at the level of a university classroom.”
At a time when anxiety levels are rising across the board for young people, studying issues of climate change and environmental injustice can be especially difficult, says Sen. “I ask this generation to speculate on alternative futures that are not all doom-ridden. Unsurprisingly, the answers are rich in potential; I have tremendous faith in the critical sensibilities of the Anthropocene generation.”
Despite the massive challenges of this moment, hearing the “vibrant ideas” of his UMass students, as well as of his own teenage daughters, leaves Sen feeling optimistic and excited for the future that will be built by younger generations.
“I think that our students are the ones we really should be guided by. The Anthropocene generation, by and large, has a revisionist view of the good life that is working towards the alternative and subversive methods we all need to adopt,” he says. “What I find most rewarding about my work is being able to build resiliency among our student populations. That, perhaps, is my end goal.”