Malcolm Sen, Associate Professor of English, Named 2024 Spotlight Scholar
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Malcolm Sen, associate professor of English at UMass Amherst, has been named a 2024 Spotlight Scholar for being a pioneer in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities.
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.