Dr. Eric Magrane

Associate Professor

Portrait of Dr. Magrane

Eric Magrane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography 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 has 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 has 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 GeographyCultural GeographiesLiterary GeographiesAntipodeEcotoneACME: An International Journal of Critical GeographiesCreativity (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.

Outside of the academy, he has also worked as a hiking guide and naturalist and has a background in environmental education. For more on his current research, teaching, and projects, see his website at www.ericmagrane.com.

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Research Interests

Cultural geography and creativity, human-environment geography, climate & culture, the Anthropocene, geopoetics, art & environment, environmental humanities, political ecology, 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 112G, World Regional Geography 

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: Geohumanities