Joshua King, Ph.D.

Joshua King is Professor of English at Baylor University (Waco, Texas), where he also directs the Environmental Humanities Minor, which prepares students to develop holistic solutions to pressing environmental problems by showing how culture conditions our understandings of and interactions with nature.  The minor integrates insights from the arts and humanities, social and natural sciences, and related pre-professional pathways (such as health and law) while involving students in hands-on learning beyond the classroom. This includes locally grounded initiatives that have received federal and foundation grants and that give students globally relevant experience by contributing to food security, environmental resilience, community wellbeing, and a culture of creation care.  He has published books and numerous journal articles and book chapters on poetics, religion, print culture, and ecotheological and environmental perspectives in nineteenth century British literature. His scholarship investigates how writers inhabiting the emergence of our own critically endangered planet drew from and reimagined theological and worship traditions to contest the devastation of environments and environmental injustice, the unequal distribution of environmental harms.  Recent and forthcoming publications ask how Anglophone poets and liturgical activists from the past through the present have celebrated the natural world and protested the unequal devastation of our common home in modernity by renovating ancient Jewish and Christian visions of all creation as a community of worship.  He has also published about and helped lead efforts to create new forms of creating knowledge and intellectual community through academic conference and knowledge-sharing that is lighter on the earth while lowering barriers to participation.  His work in environmental education is furthermore leading to scholarship on interdisciplinary, community-engaged environmental learning that involves students in pursuing local environmental justice and healing.