Who We Are
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We’re an interdisciplinary collective of graduate students grappling with widespread political inaction regarding the climate crisis by seeking to invoke sustainable material change in our communities, one thing at a time.
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Hey! You found our website. We’re Thing’s Matter. You might be wondering what we are doing here. We are a group of M.A and PhD students and candidates at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We are all in the English department, although we represent a range of disciplines. After meeting in the Fall of 2019, we realized pretty quickly that despite our disciplinary differences, we all have a strong investment in the Environmental Humanities. That’s why we started Thing’s Matter: to create a place where graduate students across all disciplines can gather to investigate questions about the livelihood of things. New Materialist scholar Jane Bennett’s seminal work on the agency of matter provides us with a framework for reconceptualizing human relationships to things. According to Bennett, "all matter has life" ("Force of Things" 351). Thus, when we define things as waste and throw them “away,” we imagine that the life of that thing no longer impacts the earth. But Bennett reminds us in her monograph on Vibrant Matter that matter “is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane as we speak” (vii). In other words—classifying things as waste is causing one of the largest contributors to the global climate crisis. With this in mind, Thing’s Matter seeks the perspectives across all disciplines to answer questions about the agency of things in structuring our social and individual behaviors. In doing so, we hope to promote ways of conceptualizing waste management in ways that benefit the Milwaukee community.
Meet Our Team
BRANDON HENRYBrandon is a PhD student in the English Department at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A creative writer, Brandon's work focuses primarily on matters of ecology, eco-poetics, speculative history, and social criticism. He earned his MA in Creative Writing from Missouri State University in 2018 and has won awards for both his creative and critical writing.
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JONI HAYWARD MARCUMJoni is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studying Film History. Her research interests stem from her ongoing dedication to active conversations about climate crisis, energy, and natural resources, and the ways in which the humanities can intervene.
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KRISTINE KOYAMAM.A., University of Minnesota Duluth | Ph.D. student, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My research concerns ecological readings of people and things between the industrial revolution up to the current historical moment.
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JANELLE MALAGONJanelle is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studying games. Her research interests focus on the rise and professionalization of eSports and live streaming.
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EMILY VAVRAEmily is an MA student in English Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research focuses primarily on feminist semiotics and representations of woman in the Early Modern period.
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JOHNNY ZAGRODNIKJohnny is an MA student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interests focus on the theater space and how it transforms in natural disasters.
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