
Willis Jenkins
Gibson Hall, S-065
Tuesdays 2.15-3.15pm and by appointment
Willis Jenkins is author of two award-winning books, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics & Christian Theology (Oxford 2008) and The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, & Religious Creativity (Georgetown 2013), which won an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence. He is editor of a number of volumes including, with Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, the Routledge Handbook of Religion & Ecology (2017).
Jenkins researches climate ethics, including religion and climate change; multispecies relations, including through food ethics; post-humanist political theologies; and religious thought amidst Anthropocene stresses. At UVA, he works with the Environmental Humanities program, teaches for the Global Sustainability major and Environmental Thought & Practice majors, and serves on the leadership team of the Environmental Resilience Institute. Much of his current research arises from transdisciplinary labs:
- Coastal Futures Conservatory, co-directed with Matthew Burtner (Music) and Karen McGlathery (Environmental Sciences), integrates arts and humanities into the coastal change research of the NSF-funded Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research.
- "Coastal Futures Conservatory: Listening as a Model for Integrating Arts and Humanities into Environmental Change Research,” Environmental Humanities (2021)
- The Water Justice Team of ERI’s Water Futures Initiative, with hydrologist Paolo D’Odorico (UC-Berkeley), focused on integrating a wider range of values into water security assessments.
- "Values-Based Scenarios of Water Security” forthcoming in Bioscience.
- Sanctuary Lab, co-directed with Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Kurtis Schaeffer, convenes researchers from arts, sciences, and humanities to collaboratively investigate how planetary bear on places marked as sacred.
- "Sacred Places and Planetary Stresses: Sanctuaries as Laboratories of Religious and Ecological Change,” Religions (2020).
- "Listening to the Hidden Land Tradition in Bhutan,” Sitelines, (2020).
For more publications, see https://virginia.academia.edu/WillisJenkins.