As we begin the semester, we're highlighting Bryn Mawr's newest faculty members. The College supports faculty excellence in both research and teaching.
The Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H. Harris M.D. Professor of Environmental Studies Sara Grossman
Assistant Professor Sara J. Grossman (Ph.D. and M.F.A., Rutgers University) specializes in the environmental humanities, with teaching and research interests in grassroots environmental culture, environmental justice, disability studies, and environmental poetry in the United States. Her first book of poems is forthcoming with New Issues Poetry & Prose in October 2018. She is currently at work on an academic monograph that examines the popular rise of environmental data through civic weather culture in the United States across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work takes up the sustainability of environmental archives and community building practices. That means asking what archives of environmental data will look like 50 years from now, as well as trying to understand how environmental data has or has not been sustainably stored in the past.
She ask questions like: "What does environmental data look like historically?" "What does it feel like?" "How has it been preserved or forgotten?" That’s where community building practices come into the picture––it's communities who have the power and capacity to help environmental data survive or disappear. This is a powerful truth, but also one that requires thoughtfulness and care across interlinked human communities.
Bryn Mawr's Environmental Studies Department combines the strengths of our two liberal arts campuses to create an interdisciplinary program that teaches students to synthesize diverse disciplinary knowledge and approaches, and to communicate effectively across disciplinary boundaries as they engage with environmental issues. In addressing these issues, ENVS students will apply critical thinking and analytical skills within a holistic, systems framework that includes social justice as an essential component.