In this time of climate and nature crisis, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s research and teaching seek to help us tell stories that will lead to better futures. To do so he combines humanistic and social scientific methods to examine the cultural dimensions of climate change, with a focus on literature and climate justice.
His primary area of research is the study of environmental literature and media. He has published empirical studies on the influence of climate fiction on readers in Environmental Humanities, Environmental Communication, ISLE, and Poetics, co-founded empirical ecocriticism, and co-edited Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). He is currently conducting systematic studies of the absence of climate change in popular films and short stories.
His second area of research addresses the potential and peril of individualistic responses to collective socio-ecological problems. His first book, Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2015), used history, sociology, and literary criticism to examine the ‘peak oil’ movement, which attracted hundreds of thousands of Americans to a form of white, libertarian environmentalism in the early 2000s. He is currently applying this lens to the psychological, ethical, and political dimensions of reproductive plans and choices in the context of climate change. He has published articles on this topic in Climatic Change, Environmental Politics, and Environmental Sociology, and has a book under contract with MIT Press.
While teaching at Yale-NUS College (in Singapore) from 2015 to 2022, Schneider-Mayerson became engaged in research on environmental problems and responses in Southeast Asia. He edited Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore (Ethos Books, 2020), the first book on environmentalism in Singapore, with all twelve essays written by his students.
He frequently collaborates with artists and authors to create novels forms of environmental culture. He co-organized Fossilized in Houston, a public climate art campaign; co-edited An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), which describes thirty ecologically productive loanwords, with illustrations from fourteen artists; and is co-authoring an ecotopian children’s book.
Schneider-Mayerson is committed to public-facing research. He recently co-created the Climate Reality Check, a “Bechdel Test for a world on fire,” and co-authored a public report that applied it to 250 of the most popular films of the last decade. This work was covered by a wide range of media, including the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Associated Press, NPR, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter.