Dr. Eric Magrane
Eric Magrane is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at New Mexico State University (NMSU). His work takes multiple forms, from scholarly to literary to artistic. He is the coeditor of The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press), a hybrid field guide and literary anthology that received several awards, including a 2016 Southwest Book of the Year and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. In his research and creative work, he is particularly interested in environmental narratives, sense of place, and contemporary artistic and literary responses to environmental change.
He has been an artist in residence in three U.S. national parks and served as poet in residence at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a bioregional zoo, botanical garden, and natural history museum. His article “Situating Geopoetics” appeared in the first issue of the American Association of Geographers’s GeoHumanities journal and established his work on the leading edge of the field. His edited book Geopoetics in Practice (2020) is published in Routledge’s Research in Culture, Space, and Identity Series.
Recent work also appears in Bioscience, Dialogues in Human Geography, Cultural Geographies, Literary Geographies, Antipode, Ecotone, ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies, Creativity (Key Ideas in Geography series, Routledge), Journal of the Southwest, and in the literary collections Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan) and Big Energy: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change (BlazeVox) and elsewhere. He has received grants, fellowships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Arizona Commission on the Arts, Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS), Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and others. He is the US book reviews editor for the journal cultural geographies, and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and the “Literary Geography: Theory and Practice” book series of University of Wales Press.
At NMSU, he has received the University Research Council Early Career Award in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and a Faculty Mentor Award from the College of Arts and Sciences.
Outside of the academy, he has also worked as a hiking guide and naturalist and has a background in environmental education. See his website at www.ericmagrane.com.
Research Interests
Cultural geography and creativity, human-environment geography, climate & culture, the Anthropocene, geopoetics, art & environment, environmental humanities, water harvesting, critical methodologies
Education
B.A. Goddard College, 1998
M.F.A. Creative Writing, University of Arizona, 2001
Ph.D. Geography, University of Arizona, 2017
Courses Taught
GEOG 1120G, World Regional Geography
GEOG 1150G, Introduction to Environmental Studies
GEOG 325V, New Mexico and the American West
GEOG 331V, Europe
GEOG 363V, Cultural Geography
GEOG 483/583, Field Explorations in Geography
GEOG 491/598, Special Topics: Critical Approaches to Place
GEOG 512, Geohumanities
GEOG 502/602, Integrative Research Design
