Ursula K. Heise

Ursula Brigitte Katrina Heise She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment that same year. She was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2026.

Biography Heise was born in 1960 in Koblenz, West Germany into a family she once said was "not particularly nature-oriented". In 1997, she published Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism, which explores the workings of plot in the postmodern novel.

Heise starting going birdwatching at Central Park with others after her experiences of buying a pet parrot; this inspired her to shift to the environmental humanities. In May 2015, she was interviewed by Los Angeles Times journalist Carla Rivera about Los Angeles' presence in science fiction.

Heise originally worked at Columbia University as an associate professor of English and comparative literature from 1999 to 2004, before moving to Stanford University where she was a professor of English and comparative literature from 2009 to 2012. She served as International Francqui Professor Chair at Ghent University from September to December 2024.

In 2011, Heise was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2024, she won the Biophilia Award in Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences.

Works Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism (1997) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (2010) Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016)