Wesleyan portrait of Elaine M. Gan

Elaine M. Gan

Assistant Professor of Science in Society

Allbritton Center, 213
860-685-3205

Assistant Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

egan@wesleyan.edu

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BA Wellesley College
MFA University of California, Santa Cruz
PHD University of California, Santa Cruz

Elaine M. Gan

Elaine Gan, MFA/PhD, is Assistant Professor of Science in Society. Teaching, research, and creative practice engage with the fields of feminist science & technology studies, multispecies anthropology, environmental/digital arts and humanities, and experimental media. As a transdisciplinary theorist-artist, Gan uses writing, drawing, installation, and time-based media to explore social relations and coordinations that emerge between species, machines, and landscapes, with a special interest in de/colonial botany, plants, and fungi.

Gan is co-editor of an interdisciplinary anthology titled Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and director of the Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab which produces a podcast about climate change. She is currently working on two book projects about two different crops: the first focuses on multispecies temporalities and global transformations of rice (Oryza sativa); the second focuses on the extinction and transgenic revival of American chestnut trees (Castanea dentata) in eastern United States, including Connecticut.

Before coming to Wesleyan, Gan was a faculty member at New York University, postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and art director for the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene Project in Denmark. She actively collaborates on experimental projects that propose methods for multispecies living. More about her practice is online at elainegan.com

Academic Affiliations

Office Hours

FALL 2023: 20-minute individual meetings with students every Monday 3-5pm at the Center for Humanities Room 203. Please book in advance here OR email for an appointment. Pre-majors only: Mondays 2-3pm, no advance booking needed.

Courses

Fall 2023
CHUM 309 - 01
The Chestnut Project

Spring 2024
SISP 210 - 01
Feminist Technoscience

SISP 331 - 01
Decolonizing Ecocinema