Heidi Scott

Heidi develops public-facing media, curriculum, and study abroad opportunities for the GEOH department. 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).

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 is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). 

Education

• PhD, Literature, University of Maryland
• MA, Literature, University of Maryland
• BS, Biology,  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research interests

• Interdisciplinary pedagogy
• climate change communication
• FEW nexus
• petroculture
• Anthropocene
• food studies
• environmental justice
• ecofeminism
• climate literature
• cultures of waste

Heidi creates pedagogy that integrates the humanities 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. 

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.