Symposium Participants

Ben Abbott is a professor of environmental science and sustainability at Brigham Young University. He has a B.S. in watershed and Earth systems science from Utah State University. His Ph.D. work in ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks culminated with a study of permafrost degradation due to climate change. He did post-doctoral research for three years at the University of Rennes in France. He works on renewable energy, global hydrology, climate change, and Earth stewardship. He is particularly interested in science communication and improving our commitment to environmental stewardship. Executive Director of Grow the Flow, he has been an influential voice regarding the ecology of Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake (see reports by him and co-authors on the two lakes HERE and HERE). He has four children who take after him in their love of animals, biking, and TV.

Thomas H. Bretz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University, where he is also the Environmental Ethics Fellow at the Center for the Study of Ethics and the coordinator for the Environmental Studies Minor. He is involved with various sustainability efforts on campus such as the sustainability committee and the planning of UVU's yearly Sustainability Week. After study at the Dresden University of Technology, The New School for Social Research, and Paris-Sorbonne University, his PhD in philosophy is from Loyola University Chicago. His research agenda is overall characterized by a concern with inclusive, just and sustainable communities. Specifically, he investigates the possibility of norms and practices that allow for reciprocal relationships between and among humans and non-humans (including so-called inanimate beings). He is currently working on a book project tentatively called "Animism as a Humanism" that aims to show that animism provides a strong form of practical rationality.

Kaymee Buell is an undergraduate studying psychology with the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah Valley University. Graduating this year with both an associate’s with an honors distinction and a bachelor's with a minor in humanities, she enjoys diversifying her education. Her interests include childhood development, trauma, and substance abuse, and extensive reading. She is currently considering going on to receive a master's in social work.

Alex Caldiero, Senior Artist in Residence in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at UVU, is a Poet/ Sonosopher/ Composer/ Musician. He is, he writes, a sonal wise guy; grandkid of dadasopher Raul Haussmann, godchild of Gertrude Stein and John Cage, bastard offspring of Sicilian bard Ignaziu Buttitta, adopted child of Joseph Smith, pseudo nephew of Allen Ginsberg, and a son of a gun. He makes things that at times appear as language or music or images, and then again as the shape of your own mind. Look! Nothing up his skin! Watch him pull a pome right outta yr heart. His books include OR, Book O’Lights, Various Atmospheres, Poetry Is Wanted Here, sonosuono, some love, Who is the dancer, what is the dance, per-sonal effects, and dozens of chapbooks (see his website HERE). The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a 50-year retrospective of Caldiero’s work in 2021: Baggage: Alex Caldiero in Retrospect.

Matthew Durrant’s compositions vary from quite traditional to more complex, atonal works. He particularly enjoys writing for winds and brass and has a number of pieces published for solo instruments and small ensembles. His work is often influenced by the sweeping vistas of the American West, particularly Idaho and Utah. Matthew holds Bachelor’s degrees in composition and piano performance from Boise State University and Master’s and PhD degrees in composition from the University of Utah. He has also studied trombone for many years and performed with a number of ensembles. His music has been performed throughout the United States at various concerts and festivals. Matthew serves as an adjunct professor of Humanities at UVU and at the University of Utah as an adjunct faculty member in the music theory area. He is also a member of the theory faculty of the Gifted Music School in Salt Lake City. When he is not teaching or working on music he is outdoors hiking and climbing mountains or spending time with family.

Kristina Gibby is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at UVU.  She holds a BA in Humanities and MA in Comparative Studies from Brigham Young University and a PhD in Comparative Literature (Minor in Hispanic Studies) from Louisiana State University.  She teaches introductory humanities courses, world literature, Caribbean literature, and Latin American humanities. Her book Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives, released last year, analyzes the role of female spirits in contemporary novels from the US and the Caribbean.

Michaela Giesenkirchen Sawyer is an associate professor of Humanities at Utah Valley University. She received her M.A. in American Studies and European History from Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf, Germany, and her Ph.D. in English from Washington University in St. Louis.  She is a former fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service and the German National Merit Foundation.  Before joining the Utah Valley University faculty in 2006, she taught writing, literature, and humanities at Washington University, Boston University, and Kenyon College. Her field of specialty is American Modernist Literature and Philosophy; she has published on Gertrude Stein, Herman Melville, William James, and Ezra Pound.  In her scholarship as well as in her teaching, she is interested in the intersections of literature, film, music, and the visual arts with science and philosophy.

Frank McEntire is well known in Utah as an independent curator, arts administrator, and writer, including catalog and e-zine essays and regular reviews as the former art critic of TheSalt Lake Tribune and Salt Lake Magazine. His sculptural works have been featured in several publications and shown throughout the west. As a curator, McEntire has organized exhibitions out of state and for Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, Springville Museum of Art, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and Utah Capitol Rotunda. He has served in leadership capacities on many boards and as former director of the Utah Arts Council. McEntire’s extraordinary recent exhibitions Silent Spring and the Anthropocene at BYU and Through a Narrow Window at Snow College established him as a powerful contributor to current environmental explorations.

Steve L. Peck is an evolutionary ecologist who has published many science papers. He is also a novelist, essayist, and poet. He has won the AML Award twice (The Scholar of Moab; Gilda Trillim), and for short story once (Two-Dog Dose). His novel based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, King Leere: Goatherd of the La Sals, was a semifinalist in Black Lawrence Press’s early novel prize and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. He has published two short story, and two essay, collections. His poetry has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Dialogue, Flyway, New Myths, Pedestal Magazine, Penumbra, Prairie Schooner, Red Rock Review, and elsewhere. His poetry collection by Aldrich Press is called, Incorrect Astronomy. His latest novel is Heike’s Void, which was nominated for the Whitney Award and AML Novel Award. 

Sam Rushforth is Dean Emeritus of the UVU College of Science. He studies aquatic botany and wetland ecology and has published more than more than 100 scholarly papers and books and mentored dozens of graduate students who are now working all over the world. He is co-author, with Scott Abbott, of Wild Rides and Wildflowers: Philosophy and Botany with Bikes, a book punctuated by microscopic photos of the diatoms that have been Rushforth’s life-long study. A forceful advocate for academic freedom, he co-founded the BYU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, work that eventually led to a biting censure of the BYU administration by the AAUP.

Dr. Leslie Simon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities, where she has been on faculty since 2011. Dr. Simon is the recipient of the Dean's Award of Excellence for Scholarship (2023), the Faculty Excellence Award (2015), the UVU CAL Mentor of the Year Award (2018), and a Student Association Wolverine Commitment to Excellence award (2016, finalist). She has served as department chair, Humanities coordinator, Honors Faculty Fellow, and interim director of the Honors Program. Dr. Simon earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Boston University, and her B.A. in English Literature and French from Texas A&M University. She has published in Dickens Quarterly, Dickens Studies Annual, Studies in the Novel, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and is currently working on a book manuscript on the heap – as an image, an object, and a paradox – in the nineteenth-century imagination, Heaps: On Dickens and Modern Mathematics.

Brittney Weiland is an interdisciplinary artist from Salt Lake City, UT. She received an AS-ARTD from Utah Valley University in December 2023. She plans to continue toward a BFA degree. Weiland has received multiple awards for her artwork and had her first solo exhibition in October 2023. Her work studies illness, identity persistence, and connection. She is married and has two fluffy cats.

Brooke Williams writes about evolution, consciousness, and his own adventures exploring both the inner and outer wilderness. His books include Open Midnight—Where Wilderness and Ancestors Meet (Trinity, 2107) and Mary Jane Wild—Two Walks and a Rant (Homebound, 2020). He believes that the length of the past equals the length of the future. He lives with the writer, Terry Tempest Williams, two cats, a dog, near Moab, Utah, where they watch the light and wait for rain.

Terry Tempest Williams founded the graduate program at the University of Utah in Environmental Humanities, leading the program for thirteen years. (https://environmental-humanities.utah.edu). She currently is Writer in Residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Her March 2023 piece in The New York Times , “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake,” weaves threads of science, personal experience, poetry, spirituality, and extraordinary photography into a powerful plea for action to save a dying lake. Williams has testified before Congress on women’s health issues, has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda. She is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Other notable books include An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field;  Desert Quartet; Leap;  Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; The Open Space of Democracy; and  Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She is a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. Her The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks , was featured by President Obama when he celebrated the centennial of National Parks at Yosemite National Park in 2016.

Maddalena Willis is a current UVU Honors student in the Bachelors of Fine Arts program focusing on painting, printmaking, and drawing. She is minoring in Earth Science and has always had a love for furthering her understanding of the natural world. Maddalena grew up in Midway, Utah where she developed a love for skiing, hiking, and studying classical ballet. Her father and mother have deep Italian roots which have had an influence on her love for art and culture. Maddalena took a break from her studies for 18 months and spent that time in Rome, Italy, where she cultivated a greater understanding of art and the human disposition to do good. Maddalena is the current “Miss Legacy,” which is part of the Miss America non-profit organization focused on community service.