BIOGRAPHY
E Cram is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. They study how race, gender, sexuality, and disability in North America shape environmental relations through techniques of violence, property, work, and health. Their expertise includes queer ecologies, queer theory, disability studies, settler colonialisms, environmental/energy cultural studies, & publicly engaged collaborative scholarship. They are an Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies & Communication.
In their first book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, Energy and the Making of the North American West (University of California Press, 2022), Cram examines the history of sexuality in the United States as a story about energy. Re-reading archives of and public encounters with sites of settler colonialism and state violence throughout the North American West, Cram traces networks of capacity building that enabled both the production of bodily vitality and the exhaustion of racialized populations. Written for scholars in queer studies and the environmental/energy humanities, this book offers a grounded account of the importance of racialized sexualities in understanding the legacies of violence in making environments and energy cultures.
Current research engages questions of queer, trans, and disability climate futures. These include the podcast: Disability Ecologies of Care and Memory and book project about the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm.
Additional future projects include The Abundant Ecologies Collaborative with Prof. Constance Gordon (San Francisco State University), a project that traces vernaculars of abundance across multiple spheres of environmental organizing.
