Elizabeth Tavella (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Romance Languages and Literatures and the Humanities Division, affiliated with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Elizabeth’s work builds on critical animal studies, decolonial methods, and queer ecology to investigate interlinked systems of oppression and liberation histories from an artistic and cultural perspective. Current research includes fieldwork exploring the liberatory potential of animal sanctuaries and land initiatives as well as an inquiry into speculative arts and practices as tools for collective justice. Other research interests include: food systems, milk studies, radical care, and narrative theory.
Elizabeth has taught environmental humanities, CAS, and sociology courses both at the University of Chicago and at the School of the Art Institute and has recently joined the editorial team of Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment as the creative writing and arts editor. Recent publications include chapters in two edited volumes: the first in Animals and Race, published by Michigan University Press, and the second in Interrogating the Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises, Lexington Books. In addition to finalizing a monograph on geographies of interspecies confinement, Elizabeth is co-editing a multimedia digital project titled Animated Wor(l)ds: Language and Relationality for Multispecies Kinship.
Recent courses in RLL
- ITAL 10100 Beginning Elementary Italian I (Autumn 2016)
- ITAL 10200 Beginning Elementary Italian II (Winter 2017)
- ITAL 21822 Creative Ecologies: Environmental and Multispecies Storytelling (Autumn 2021)
- ITAL 25218 Reading Nonhuman Animals: A Challenge to Anthropocentrism (Winter 2019)