Adrian J. Ivakhiv

Adrian J. Ivakhiv is a Canadian-American scholar of environmental humanities, ecomedia studies, and religion and nature. He holds the J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Previously, he was Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont (2003–2024), where he also held the Steven Rubenstein Professorship for Environment and Natural Resources (2016–2020).

His work on cinema and ecology has been described as a major contribution to the field of ecocritical film studies.

Ivakhiv is also a musician and a composer.

Early life and education Ivakhiv was born in Toronto to parents who had come to Canada as refugees from Ukraine after World War II. In 1989–1990, he was a Canada-USSR Scholar, spending a year in Kyiv and Lviv studying the cultural impacts of the Chernobyl disaster.

Career Ivakhiv taught at York University from 1997 to 2000 in various capacities, including as adjunct faculty and lecturer in the Faculty of Environmental Studies and the Division of Humanities. He was an assistant professor of environmental studies and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh from 2000 to 2003.

In 2003, he joined the University of Vermont, where he was promoted to full professor in 2013. He served as acting director of the Environmental Program in 2011 and held the Steven Rubenstein Professorship for Environment and Natural Resources from 2016 to 2020. He was also named a University Scholar At UVM, he co-founded and coordinated EcoCultureLab, a research group linking ecological art, scholarship, and community projects. He was also profiled in Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews, a volume of conversations with philosophers edited by Paul John Ennis.

Ivakhiv was a co-founder of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada and served as its president from 1999 to 2000. He is a fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich, and was a research fellow at the Cinepoetics Centre for Advanced Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (2022–2023), where he participated in a research project on visuality and the Anthropocene.

He has conducted fieldwork on eco-cultural conflicts in the U.S. Southwest, the British Isles, western and central Ukraine, maritime eastern Canada, and Vermont. His 2013 book Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) proposed a "process-relational" eco-philosophy of cinema, drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. It is the most widely cited book of ecocinema theory. His 2025 book The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds (Stanford University Press) extends this framework to digital media, tracing how images shape perception and politics in the Anthropocene. He is also founding co-editor of Media+Environment, an open access peer-reviewed journal published by the University of California Press. a two-volume reference work with over 500 contributing scholars, and has served on the editorial boards of Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, Green Letters, The Journal of Ecocriticism, and Environmental Communication.

Ukraine Ivakhiv has written on environmental politics, cultural identity, and religion in Ukraine, including work on the cultural politics of Chornobyl, Ukrainian-Polish borderland identities, Ukrainian environmental ethics, and Ukrainian Native Faith movements. The volume was supported by the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Olga M. Ciupka Memorial Fund. Ivakhiv has been a guest at the International Book Arsenal Festival at Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv, and the Leipziger Buchmesse in Leipzig, speaking on ecology and the war in Ukraine.

Selected works Books Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana University Press, 2001) Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum Books, 2018) The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2025) Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (ed., McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies (co-ed., Routledge, 2023)

Review articles Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Toward a multicultural ecology." Organization and Environment 15, no. 4 (2002): 389-409. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Nature and self in New Age pilgrimage." Culture and Religion 4, no. 1 (2003): 93-118. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Nature and ethnicity in East European paganism: an environmental ethic of the religious right?." Pomegranate 7, no. 2 (2005). Ivakhiv, Adrian. "In Search of Deeper Identities Neopaganism and" Native Faith" in Contemporary Ukraine." Nova Religio 8, no. 3 (2005): 7-38. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Colouring Cape Breton: 'Celtic' Topographies of Culture and Identity in Cape Breton Island." Ethnologies 27, no. 2 (2005): 107-136. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Stoking the heart of (a certain) Europe: Crafting hybrid identities in the Ukraine-EU borderlands." Spaces of Identity 6, no. 1 (2006): 11-44. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Toward a geography of "religion": Mapping the distribution of an unstable signifier." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 1 (2006): 169-175. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Green film criticism and its futures." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15, no. 2 (2008): 1-28. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Stirring the geopolitical unconscious: Towards a Jamesonian ecocriticism." New Formations 64 (2008): 98-110. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "From frames to resonance machines: The neuropolitics of environmental communication" Environmental Communication 4, no. 1 (2010): 109-121. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. "The anthrobiogeomorphic machine: Stalking the zone of cinema." Film-Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2011): 118-139. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Green pilgrimage: Problems and prospects for ecology and peace-building." Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, ed. C. A. González Paz (Ashgate, 2012), 85-103. Ivakhiv, Adrian. "Chernobyl, Risk, and the Inter-Zone of the Anthropocene." The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, ed. B. Ghosh and B. Sarkar (Routledge, 2000), 219-232.