Rate My Professor Heather Houser

Heather Houser is a full professor in the Department of Literature, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, at the University of Antwerp. She teaches courses including Contemporary American Environmental Literature, Twentieth-century Literature in English 2, Twentyfirst-century Literature in English, The Outsider in Global Anglophone Literature, American Fiction Now: The Newest of the New, and Creative Non-Fiction: Theories, Genres, Methods. Her research examines contemporary cultural responses to environmental challenges such as climate change, particularly how the climate crisis influences reproductive decision-making in literature, film, and art. Additional interests encompass cultural representations of science and technology, reproductive justice, environmental justice, critical studies of data and information, and creative nonfiction writing. She integrates humanities perspectives into municipal climate planning and environmental advocacy. As promoter of the doctoral project Narrating Parental Regret in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (2026-2030), she explores narrative techniques like counterfactual temporalities, focalization, and metaphor in anglophone fiction since 1990, theorizing parental regret as an affective, ethical, and political emotion tied to gender, race, class, sexuality, and life stage. This work advances affect theory, health humanities, and insights into parenting amid uncertainty. She is a member of the Antwerp Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism.

Prior to her position at the University of Antwerp, Heather Houser was the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin until August 2025, where she chaired Planet Texas 2050 (2019-2020), served on the transportation advisory group for Austin’s Climate Equity Plan (2019-2021), and the Joint Sustainability Commission (2022-2025). Her monograph Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020) was a finalist for the 2022 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Award and the 2021 ASLE-UKI Book Prize. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014) received the 2015 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize. She held a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2023-2025) at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Whiting Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Tanner Humanities Center, UT Austin, and Stanford University. She serves on the editorial team of C21 Literature and is completing Our Bodies, Our Climate and Girl Striving, a memoir in essays.