Bridging the environmental humanities with sustainability in higher education.
An award winning author and educator, I operate at the inter- and transdisciplinary intersections of religion and nature, environmental ethics, environmental history, critical theory, posthumanism, sustainability science, environmental studies, energy humanities/climate change, material feminism, animal studies, and ecological animisms, as seen in my 2021 book Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future. I reside in Charleston, SC and work at The College of Charleston on landscapes sacred to and traditionally stewarded by the Kusso-Natchez peoples and I can be reached at levasseurtj@cofc.edu and followed on Twitter at @dr_levasseur. For academic year 2022-2023 I am on a leave of absence as I will be a senior lecturer at Yale National University Singapore College in their Environmental Studies program.
“This groundbreaking, daring book provides a glimpse, a foothold, for what religion, in theory and practice, may come to look like if climate change, if Earth, if material bodies — all bodies — were taken as the most basic consideration of our thinking and acting. Innovative, provocative, and eloquent, Todd LeVasseur has opened the boundaries of the study of religion and theology in ways that are sure to definitively shape the field, and the academy, into the future.”– Gretel Van Wieren, Michigan State University
Welcome to my work!
I examine and study the interface of cultural narratives and identities, with a specific focus on those in the domain we label religion, and how these both shape and are shaped by the natural, “more-than-human” world within globalized political ecologies and the onset of climate triage. My work is thoroughly interdisciplinary, while being comparative and historical in scope and method. I utilize a variety of social scientific and humanistic research methods to engage the overarching research question that guides my scholarly path: how can the human animal, from individual to global scales, learn to actively generate just, regenerative, resilient, and sustainable behaviors and lifeways as we move into the Anthropocene, if at all?
As a faculty member I am a senior instructor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at The College of Charleston in the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program where I teach a variety of environmental humanities, Honors, and first year experience courses. From 2016-2022 I directed The College of Charleston’s SACSCOC re-accreditation project, “Sustainability Literacy as a Bridge to Addressing 21st Century Problems.” This was a campus-wide effort to embed triple bottom line (social, environmental, economic systems) thinking across the curricula through a variety of programming and trainings that I organized and managed. I am also an active member of the advisory council for the Sustainability Curriculum Consortium.
For an example of my public scholarship on the above for religion and nature, click here; for sustainability, click here and here; and for an interview on my 2021 book on climate change and religion, click here.
Dr. Todd LeVasseur 