Dr. Emerson Cram is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Communication and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, and brings expertise in frameworks of critical environmental justice that center recursive relationships between race, disability, sexuality and the environment. 

Their first book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (University of California Press, 2022) examines the history of sexuality in the US as a story about energy to contextualize the regenerative and land-based practice of queer ecology today. Written for scholars in queer studies and the environmental/energy humanities, this book highlights how various regional communities engage cultural and environmental legacies of harm to reimagine violent ecologies through practices of care, healing, and regeneration. Violent Inheritance is the awardee of the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2023 Book Award, and the National Communication Association’s 2023 GLBTQ Communication Studies Division Book Award. 

Their current project is preliminarily titled Regenerating Mad Ecologies and Environmental Futures at a US Historic Poor Farm, which draws from a wide range of archives, community interviews, and field work at a former poor farm located in Iowa. As a whole, the project maps historical connections between poor farms and carceral systems and underscores the significance of the site’s redesign in terms of disability, community land use, and care. This work was recognized with the 2023 Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award by the National Communication Association. 

Their essays have appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication, Environmental Communication, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, among others, in addition to Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies (New York University Press, 2016). Dr. Cram is the 2022 recipient of the National Communication Association’s Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division’s Early Career Award in addition to the 2014 recipient of the Stephen Lucas Debut Publication Award from the National Communication Association.