Debapriya Sarkar is an associate professor of English and maritime studies at the University of Connecticut. She researches and teaches at the intersections of early modern literature, literature/science studies, ecocriticism, maritime studies, premodern critical race studies, women’s writing, and postcolonial theory. She is the author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). This project has been supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly on“Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms” (2019). She is currently working on a second book project on early modern poetics and racecraft and (with Hillary Eklund) on the interdisciplinary public humanities project, Waterways, which aims to foster community-driven, place-based, and historically informed initiatives on environmental studies, centered on bodies of water and the lives they connect and sustain.

 She has also published articles in PMLA, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in edited collections including The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race and A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age. Her public writing has appeared in Arcade and The Sundial.

Hillary Eklund is a professor of English at Grinnell College and specializes in literatures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and regularly teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry, and literature and environment. In her scholarship, she seeks to understand the moral attitudes and material practices of the era that gave rise to the Spanish and English empires, global capitalism, and slavery.

Her first book, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Routledge, 2015), describes how literary texts trace changing perceptions of what it means to have enough at the turn of the seventeenth century. Eklund is the editor of Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (Penn State University Press, 2017), and co-editor, with Wendy Beth Hyman, of Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Teaching Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She has published essays in journals such as Shakespeare Studies, SEL, Criticism, ELR, and PMLA (forthcoming), as well as book chapters in collections on a variety of topics. She is the co-founder, with Debapriya Sarkar, of the Renaissance Racial and Environmental Justice Working Group, an interdisciplinary public humanities initiative.  

Her current book project describes how wetlands, often perceived as nature’s mistakes, both compel and elude human designs in the seventeenth century. Wetlands, she argues, demonstrate a series of “unfast” countermoves to the fast violence of colonial incursion and technological imposition, and to the slow violence of ecological manipulation and resource expropriation.