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). He is at work on a book tentatively entitled After Humanity, on moral lives of the Anthropocene.

Jenkins the relation moral imagination to rapid environmental change along several lines of research:

• religion and climate change, about which he has advised UNFCC and IPBES reports and participated in transnational research projects;
• climate ethics, including work on shifting conceptions of virtue and on shifting conceptions of climate justice in the Vatican and from pipeline protests; 
• multispecies relations, including ethics amidst extinctions.

At UVA, Jenkins chairs the Department of Religious Studies, co-directs the Institute for Practical Ethics, co-founded the Environmental Humanities program, teaches for the Global Sustainability and Environmental Thought & Practice majors, and serves on the leadership team of the Environmental Resilience Institute. Current research arises from transdisciplinary labs at intersections of science and humanities, including:

• 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. Featured in this Mellon Foundation video.
  • "Coastal Futures Conservatory: Listening as a Model for Integrating Arts and Humanities into Environmental Change Research,” Environmental Humanities (2021)

• A water justice project co-led with hydrologist Paolo D’Odorico (UC-Berkeley) and involving a research team from law, environmental science, and engineering, focused on integrating a wider range of values into water security assessments.
  • "Values-Based Scenarios of Water Security” Bioscience (2021)

• 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.