Danielle Endres to Lead Environmental Humanities Program

The College of Humanities at the University of Utah has named Danielle Endres, professor of communication, as the next director of the Environmental Humanities Program. Endres will begin her appointment on July 1, 2023 when Professor Jeffrey McCarthy concludes his nine-year tenure as director. The college is immensely grateful for McCarthy’s many years of service and is looking forward to working with Endres in her new role.

“Jeff has successfully served as the director of the program since 2014 and since then, he has graduated nearly 70 students and placed many of them in PhD programs, professional programs, non-profit leadership roles and the Fulbright program,” said Hollis Robbins, dean of the College of Humanities. “Among his many accomplishments, he created the Utah Award in the Environmental Humanities to celebrate environmental leadership and expression and most recently used a Mellon Foundation grant to create an Environmental Humanities Community Fellows Program to promote environmental justice.”

The Environmental Humanities Program integrates the need to know with the desire to act. It aims to produce an interdisciplinary, intellectual and creative space in which students are prepared to reflect on what it means to be "human" in a world of entangled human and animal presences, to encourage creative and collaborative exchanges both inside and outside the classroom and to think in a forward fashion both about new forms of environmental leadership and stewardship, and about the intersection of ecology and environmental justice.

“I am grateful to be stepping in to lead a successful and vibrant program with a remarkable foundation that McCarthy and his predecessors built,” said Endres. “I am eager to continue to deepen the program’s engagement with environmental justice community groups, local Native peoples and nations, frontline communities, and campus partners so that our students can be a part of building just and equitable environmental futures.”

About Danielle Endres

Endres’s research and teaching expertise lies in areas that interest and excite many of the Environmental Humanities’ students: environmental communication, social movements, and Indigenous studies. As a rhetorical theorist and critic, she has examined a variety of historical and contemporary controversies, such as nuclear colonization in the American West, energy policy, climate change, Native American mascots, and dominant spatial practices. She is also interested in rhetorical methods, particularly the use of ethnography, oral history, interviewing and other participatory approaches in the practice of rhetorical criticism.

Endres has received notable awards to support her recent research, including an NSF grant to research practices of energy democracy in Puerto Rico and a grant from the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy to research how climate policy is developed through United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations. Endres has a new book coming out in Fall 2023 called “Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting.”

Endres has been a pivotal part of the Environmental Humanities Program since its inception in 2005. She taught the field methods course to the first cohort of Environmental Humanities students, and she held the inaugural Research Professorship in Environmental Humanities, which supported her in turning her dissertation into published articles. For many years, she continued to teach the field methods course, which in the early years used nuclear issues in the American West as a case study for learning environmental humanities methods. She has continued to stay involved in the program by working with students on their master’s theses and projects, particularly those that relate to nuclearism, Indigenous studies, and climate or energy justice activism.