Barri J. Gold, Professor of Practice in English and Inaugural Senior Fellow in the Environmental Innovations Initiative, is a scholar of 19th Century British literature, Literature and Science, and Ecocriticism. With a background in Physics, she has been especially interested in the Victorian development of energy concepts as well as in the nascent ecological discourse of which these were a part. 

Winner of the 2021 BSLS Book Prize for best book in the field of literature and science, her most recent book, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), not only explores the way the novel is implicated in creating our ecology-breaking culture, but also how we may draw on it to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. 

Her first book, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (The MIT Press, 2010, 2012), explores Victorian literature's engagement with energy science--especially the laws of thermodynamics. In her more recent work, she has become especially interested in how the stories we tell shape us as ecological beings, for better and worse. 

EII Faculty Spotlight: https://environment.upenn.edu/news-events/news/faculty-spotlight-barri-j...