Sarah Ensor

Recent Books

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  Ensor, Sarah. Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World. NYU Press, 2025. Print.

  What does it mean to live at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? When faced with unfurling catastrophes, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the future. Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She looks to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of a terminal present. While living “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, queer culture reminds us that “to last” is itself also one way to go on.

  Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—ending and persisting—are constitutively intertwined, Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on futurelessness: the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s, in which the spread of the AIDS epidemic threatened the total loss of gay lives and of specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its intimacy with death and loss, offers a rich archive for imagining new ways of thinking through environmental collapse. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the terminal paradigms that environmentalism fears, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.

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  Ensor (Co-editor), Sarah. The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, 2022. Print.

  This Companion offers a capacious overview of American environmental literature and criticism. Tracing environmental literatures from the gates of the Manzanar War Relocation Camp in California to the island of St. Croix, from the notebooks of eighteenth-century naturalists to the practices of contemporary activists, this book offers readers a broad, multimedia definition of ‘literature’, a transnational, settler colonial comprehension of America, and a more-than-green definition of ‘environment’. Demonstrating links between ecocriticism and such fields as Black feminism, food studies, decolonial activism, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and carceral studies, the volume reveals the persistent relevance of literary methods within the increasingly interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, while also modeling practices of literary reading shaped by this interdisciplinary turn. The result is a volume that will prove indispensable both to students seeking an overview of American environmental literature/criticism and to established scholars seeking new approaches to the field.

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