Board Members

President

Goutam Mahji

Goutam Majhi, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Sadhan Chandra Mahavidyalaya (affiliated with the University of Calcutta), has developed a sustained research interest in Environmental Humanities, ecocriticism, plant humanities, and radical environmentalism. He is a founding member and President of the Global Plant Humanities Network (GPHN), an international scholarly network dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research on plants, ecology, culture, and the humanities. His recent co-edited collection is Beyond the Heteronorm: Critiquing Critical Alterities in Global Art & Literature (Bloomsbury, 2024). His forthcoming edited collections include Reverberating Past: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Art of Nostalgia by Anthem Press (2027), Environmental Humanities in a North-South Framework, Postcolonial Ecospheres: Environmental Principles, Policies, and Politics in South Asia (Forthcoming), and The Botanical Imagination in North-East India: Plants, Culture, and the Vegetal Humanities by Bloomsbury (Forthcoming). He is the Managing Editor of the International Journal of Contemporary Humanities and serves on the editorial board of Plant Perspectives, published by White Horse Press. He is currently working as an International Project Assistant on the research project titled Gifts from the Sentient Forest: Collaboration; Communication Between People & Trees in Northern Finland (2024-26). His research interests include Plant Humanities, Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism, Posthumanism, Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Vice-President

Patrycia Austin

Patrycja Austin is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów, Poland, where she teaches British and American literature. She received her PhD from the University of Warsaw in 2013 for her research on Indian writing in English. In recent years, her research has focused on the hermeneutics of reading and, more particularly, the emerging field of plant humanities. She is the co-author of Memes and Meaning: Presence and Transcendence in Literature (Routledge, 2016). Her forthcoming monograph, Living Time: Vegetal Temporalities in the Post-2010 American Novel, is scheduled for publication in spring 2027.

Senior Advisor

John Charles Ryan

John C. Ryan is an international researcher in literary studies, creative writing, and environmental humanities who serves as Senior Professorial Advisor to the GPHN. He is affiliated with the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia as Adjunct Senior Research Fellow. Ryan’s books include Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination (Routledge) and Phytocriticism: The Literary and Cultural Analysis of Plants (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Funded by the Kone Foundation in Helsinki, his most recent work examined possibilities for human-tree collaboration in Northern Finland. Ryan also serves as Managing Co-Editor of The Trumpeter. For further information, visit www.johncharlesryan.com.  

Senior Advisor

Gregory F. Tague

Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D. (1998 NYU), is Professor Emeritus at St. Francis College, N.Y., where he founded the Evolutionary Studies Collaborative and hosted Darwin-inspired Moral Sense Colloquia. Books include Forest Sovereignty (2025), The Vegan Evolution (2022), An Ape Ethic and the Question of Personhood (2020), Art and Adaptability (2018), Evolution and Human Culture (2016), and  Making Mind (2014). Tague’s current interests focus on environmental and animal ethics. Information at https://sites.google.com/site/gftague/

Outreach Coordinator and South America Liaison

Suênio Stevenson

Suenio Stevenson Tomaz de la Silva is an Associate Professor of anglophone literatures and Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Modern Languages and Teaching at the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), Brazil. He holds a PhD in Literature and Interculturality. He defended a thesis about an ecocritical study of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy in 2019 at the State University of Paraíba (UEPB). He was also a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of Idaho (academic year 2017-2018), where he researched environmental humanities under the supervision of Scott Slovic. Suênio Stevenson was also a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan (academic year 2018-2019), doing research with Greg Garrard. Since then, his research interests have been environmental humanities and climate change fiction.  

Postgraduate Representative

Kumari Gunjan

Kumari Gunjan is a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. Her research explores Environmental Humanities and Plant Studies. She is a lifetime honorary member of the Global Plant Humanities Network and an active contributor to their annual international conferences. She has also published articles in journals such as Literature & Aesthetics and the International Journal of English Language and Studies, and her review of Sumana Roy’s Plant Thinkers of Twentieth Century Bengal was published in the 2025 issue of the journal Literature & Aesthetics. 

Research Coordinator

Lívia Szélpál

Lívia Szélpál is a senior assistant professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Szeged (SZTE). She completed her M.A. in American Studies (2004) and History (2005) at SZTE and earned a PhD in Comparative History from the Central European
University (Budapest) in 2013. Her research explores the intersections of literature and history, with particular emphasis on ecocriticism, contemporary women writers, and memory
studies. She has published articles on Zora Neale Hurston and Zadie Smith. Her co-authored essay, “Reflections on Intimations: A Social-Historical Analysis,” was published in the edited volume Zadie Smith: New Perspectives (Edited by Nurten Birlik and Noémi Albert,
Manchester University Press, April 2026). Email: [szelpal.livia@szte.hu]. ORCID: 0009-0001-8194-6118.

Secretary

Sydney Kale

Sydney Kale is a Ph.D. candidate in Wisdom Studies at Ubiquity University. Her research focuses on creating with and learning from plants through phenomenological and artistic means. Her books include The Love Language of Plants: Stories of Becoming Written by a Human and Her Plants (2024), I, Garden, // Garden as Palimpsest (2025), and Becoming Written: A Year of Writing Stories in a Home I Loved (2025). Her most recent publications restory the invasive-plant narrative to reflect ecological realities that decenter human morality. For more information, visit www.sydneykale.com.