Rate My Professor Emilie Mears

Emilie Mears is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of English at the College of Arts and Sciences, William & Mary. She earned her Ph.D. in English with a focus on Literature, Media, and Culture from Florida State University, defending her dissertation "Revelations and Resilience: Environmental Apocalypse in Southern Literature" on October 25, 2021. Directed by Professor Andrew Epstein, with committee members including Silvia Valisa, Aaron Jaffe, and Trinyan Mariano, the work examines transformations in apocalypticism and nature representations in twentieth-century American literature, particularly Southern literature. It analyzes ecological tropes where Southern writers access the immaterial world through regional environments, proposing an ecotheology that shifts discourse from disaster spectacle to resilience narratives. Keywords include aesthetics, apocalypse, ecocriticism, ecotheology, literature, and Southern Studies. Previously, Mears received a Master of Liberal Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities from Rollins College.

Mears specializes in twentieth-century American literary and cultural studies with concentrations in environmental literature, ecocriticism, and Southern Studies. Her peer-reviewed publications include "Recycling as Creativity: An Environmental Approach to Early Twentieth-Century American Art" in American Studies Journal No. 64 (2018), exploring how artists such as William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham used discarded materials to contest waste and foster ecological awareness through chance operations and found objects. She also published in Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies on environmental disasters in mass media, African American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, highlighting environmental racism. Mears presented ecocritical papers at conferences including ASLE (2017), ACLA (2018), PAMLA, SAMLA, SASA, the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs Conference (2014), and the Summer Institute of American Philosophy Conference (2015). She was awarded the May Alexander Ryburn Fellowship and the Harmon Bickley Graduate Conference Travel Award (2019) from Florida State University.