DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Sarah Dimick (she/her/hers) is jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture. Her research focuses on portrayals of climate change and environmental justice in contemporary global Anglophone literatures. Her first book, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia University Press, 2024), examines how the environmental arrhythmias of an overheated world jar literary and cultural forms. Ranging from Marshallese spoken word poetry to Indian science writing to canonical American literature, Unseasonable argues that knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via the literary.

Professor Dimick’s writing has appeared in journals including ISLE, Contemporary Literature, Post45: Contemporaries, Mosaic, and other venues. Her research has been supported by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, and the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger. She currently serves as a co-editor for Under the Sign of Nature, a book series in the environmental humanities published by University of Virginia Press.

Specializations

Science & Literature, American: 20th Century, Postcolonial

Books

Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia University Press, 2024)

Articles and Chapters

• “Cleaning Women: Occupational Health and Broken Solidarities.” Post45: Contemporaries. February 29, 2024.
• “Guerrilla Gardening: At the Intersection of Birnam Wood and Minneapolis.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, published online Dec. 27, 2023, print version forthcoming.
• “The Poetry of Climatic Witness: Slam Poets at United Nations Climate Summits.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 62, no. 4, 2022, pp. 558-89.
• “Working with Environmental Justice Organizations in Postcolonial Environmental Literature Classes.” Co-authored with Cheryl Johnson, Director of People for Community Recovery. Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, edited by Cajetan Iheka, Modern Languages Association, 2022, pp. 346-356.
• “Seasonal Processions.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate, edited by Adeline Johns and Kelly Sultzbach, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 27-39.
• “Frontiers of a Shrinking World: Recent Climate Fiction.” Climate and American Literature, edited by Michael Boyden, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 257-272.
• “Disordered Environmental Time: Phenology, Climate Change, and Seasonal Form in Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 25, no. 4, 2018, pp. 700-21.
• “From Suspect to Species: Climate Crime in Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer.” Mosaic, vol. 51, no. 3, Sept 2018, pp. 19-35.
• “Speaking to Us, Speaking to the World: Elizabeth Kolbert on the Craft of Environmental Journalism.” Edge Effects, 18 Nov 2014.