Heidi Scott

Dr. Heidi Scott is the Communications Director for the Global FEWture Alliance. She develops public-facing media, curriculum, and study abroad opportunities for our group. She was recently a Communications Associate who developed educational tools for SESYNC, and she teaches at the University of Maryland as a Senior Lecturer in English. She was an Assistant Clinical Professor (2019–2022) in University Honors, where she won an Impact and Innovation Teaching Award for the course Ecology of Identity (2022).

Her books, Chaos and Cosmos (2014) and Fuel: An Ecocritical History (2018), take an epistemological approach to ecology that bridges the humanities and sciences. Her work centers on microcosm models in poetry and empirical science; narrative meaning in eras of rupture and rapid change; and the literature of energy: petroculture versus renewable sources and their cultural-ontological effects.

Heidi creates pedagogy that integrates human and social insights with bioscience to elucidate how our view of nature has been the co-creation of cultural, economic, and scientific perspectives. She employs several emotional, tonal, and creative registers to blaze a solutions-based path forward. She is an amateur filmmaker whose short films, Landfill (2020), Treescape Room (2022), and Postcards from Petroculture (2023) have appeared in local film festivals. 

Heidi earned a PhD and MA in Literature from the University of Maryland, and a BS in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). 

Research interests: Interdisciplinary pedagogy; climate change communication; petroculture; Anthropocene; food studies; environmental justice; ecofeminism; climate literature; cultures of waste

Areas of expertise: Environmental humanities; history of science; literature; ecocriticism; environmental film