Cymene Howe

Cymene Howe is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology and founding faculty of the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. She is the author of Intimate Activism (Duke 2013) and Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke 2019), which follows how human and more-than-human lives are affected by renewable energy transitions as political, infrastructural and environmental processes. She is co-editor of the The Johns Hopkins Guide to Theory and Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon (Punctum 2020), a collection of 86 short essays that examine the Anthropocene condition from orthogonal, transdisciplinary viewpoints. Cymene’s current research focuses on the changing dynamics between human populations and bodies of ice in the Arctic region and sea level adaptation responses in lower latitude coastal cities as a series of sociophysical linkages that she calls “hydrological globalization.” From 2015-2019 she hosted the weekly Cultures of Energy with Dominic Boyer—a collection of 200 conversations on environmental precarity and responses to it—available on all podcast apps. With Boyer, she produced the documentary film Not Ok: A Little Movie about a Small Glacier at the End of the World (2018) and in August 2019, initiated the installation of the world’s first memorial to glacier fallen to climate change. The Okjökull memorial event in Iceland served as a global call to action and in memory of a world rapidly melting away.