About

Robert Marzec is a professor of environmental and postcolonial studies at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University in 2000 and joined the Purdue English Department in 2007. His affiliations include the Center for the Environment, the Institute for Sustainable Futures, the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS), and the Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) program. Marzec is an interdisciplinary postcolonial ecologist who specializes in bridging the natural and social sciences with the humanities, partnering with faculty across campus to address issues such as climate change, biodiversity conservation, and environmental justice. He is a co-founder and co-coordinator of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies (ESS) certificate, an initiative that unites faculty from multiple colleges including Agriculture, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Science, and Health and Human Sciences. Marzec also serves as a convener for Purdue's Institute for a Sustainable Future Special Initiative, which focuses on imagining a sustainable future by coupling imagination and research across various disciplines. His work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Purdue University. As an author, he has published works including 'Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State' and 'An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature,' and he is the editor of 'Postcolonial Literary Studies: the First 30 Years' and the journal Modern Fiction Studies. His articles have appeared in numerous academic journals, and he is currently working on a documentary about the 2021 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow and a monograph on biodiversity. Additionally, Marzec is an active musician and composer.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Archaeology
• Environmental ethics
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• History
• Geography
• Psychoanalysis
• Law
• Linguistics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Prisons, Immigration, and the Right to a Livable Life in the Anthropocene: Reading Garrett Hardin and Michel Foucault

  boundary 2 · 2024 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract Critical work theorizing the nature of immigration imprisonment in relation to anthropogenically influenced ecological phenomena is in its infancy. Scholars have productively made sense of the modern carceral state's expansion by locating it within the framework of race and neoliberalism, registering the collateral damage essential to Western European whiteness and a neoliberal problematic. These framings of migrant incarceration continue to effectively serve a critical function. However, this essay argues that the historical character of immigration incarceration is in the process of changing in the face of real and imagined Anthropocene impacts. Increasingly, immigration is the result of ecological collapse, and taking race and neoliberalism as primary frameworks for understanding forces subtending the carceral system has become critically restrictive. This essay develops an environmental genealogy from historical references within Michel Foucault's work on the relationship between land enclosures and rise of the prison, in order to establish a larger constellation in which to think the event of immigration incarceration today. The essay places Foucault's work in conversation with the work of prominent ecologist and white nationalist Garrett Hardin, whose concurrent pro-enclosure work on immigration and the environment inaugurated a coercive truth discourse that has come to impact not only ecological disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the environmental humanities but also current US immigration policy.

  PublisherDOI

• Editor’s Note

  Modern fiction studies · 2024-05-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Editor's Note Robert P. Marzec MFS Modern Fiction Studies is now in its seventieth year of publication. The idea for MFS, as told to me by my dear friend, colleague, and the journal's previous editor, John N. Duvall, began during a conversation between some of the faculty members of the Purdue English Department, who happened to be out taking the pleasures of the day on a local golf course. I can only imagine what this conversation was like. I expect they were aware that F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review had published its last issue only two years before, in 1953. They no doubt were reflecting on the landscape of literary criticism journals that would have been in existence in 1955—among the most prominent being PMLA, American Literature, South Atlantic Quarterly, MLH, Arizona Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. Most of the journals we are familiar with today would not have published their first issues until two, three, even four decades later. I am certain they felt a profound absence in the field of literary criticism and felt intellectually compelled to start a scholarly journal that would create what had yet to exist: a stage for publishing cutting edge scholarship devoted to the best works of modern fiction. The journal and the profession underwent significant changes over the course of those many years. For just shy of a quarter of a century John helped spearhead those changes. His passionate intellectual commitment to literary, theoretical, and cultural studies was instrumental in expanding the journal's importance, impact, and scope. The new directions the journal explored during those years reflected and helped generate new scholarly developments in the [End Page 203] multidisciplinary field of critical literary studies. In the course of his time as editor, John worked with hundreds of authors and dozens of guest editors, showcasing some of the best critical thought. His insistence that guest editors of special issues do their best to include work by Ph.D. students and young scholars helped create a space for the next generation of scholars to showcase their ability to write on timely and important topics. I'm pleased that John will continue to be involved in the production of the journal as one of its board members. The scholarly landscape of the twenty-first century is profoundly different from the landscape of 1955. Literary studies, and the humanities in general, are in the process of an alarming change, the antecedents of which can be traced back to sequences begun even before the founding of MFS. In the last thirty years, the academy has come to experience the full effect of the neoliberal economic paradigm. Jobs in English and the humanities have been declining since the 1970s, but they have been declining even more so each year since the 2007–2008 recession, with the most severe declines due to the impact of COVID-19: "a 27.45 decline" (Lusin and Hunt)in 2020–2021, "the steepest since the 27.0% decline in 2008–09." The slow erosion of tenure lines and the increasing legislative attacks on tenure add to this, impacting job security, academic freedom, and academic scholarship. In the course of the last four decades neoliberalism has become a defining ontological framework for cultural production, bequeathing us a cultural sphere where creativity is brigaded through the avenues given to us by entrepreneurship and corporate demands. As Bill Readings argued almost thirty years ago, the university has "progressively abandoned its cultural claim" (150) in favor of the corporate-infused idea of "excellence" (12). The social and behavioral sciences are not immune to these developments, and neither are the hard sciences. Over the past thirty years research and development funding for the sciences by the federal government remained on a plateau, whereas business sector funding accelerated, with the share of funding ranging "from 61% to 72% yearly" (National Science Board). The federal government is still the largest source of funding for basic science research, but business sector funding, now nearly four times that of federal, favors applied research and development. Certain STEM disciplines and programs win out over others, and enrollments in these disciplines are growing. Whereas enrollments...

  PublisherDOI

• The Anthropocene and Ecological Limits in the Works of Salman Rushdie

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Geography
  • Environmental ethics

  This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of ecocritical considerations, which have increasingly preoccupied critics in the age of the Anthropocene. The representations of Rushdie’s urban and rural environments directly intersect with issues around environmental toxification, droughts, and famines. This is explored through urban planning and the spectre of postcolonial developmental policies, through, for example, the building of hydroelectric dams. Yet Rushdie brings to these considerations a further dimension in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where these issues take most prominence. The metaphors of ground splitting, earthquakes, and environmental disaster are here closely intertwined. Shalimar the Clown engages with the toxification of the Kashmir valley through military hardware, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, featuring a gardener as its central character, also considers the post-apocalyptic world of New York, when the known world is altered after New York is hit by a storm. This little explored aspect of Rushdie’s work opens up a new critical conceptual dimension and illuminates important environmental concerns of his later novels.

  PublisherDOI

• Worlding Environmental Studies

  2021-10-22

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 17 Contemporary Anthropocene Novels: Ian McEwan’s Solar, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-09-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  17 Contemporary Anthropocene Novels: Ian McEwan’s Solar, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood was published in New Directions in Philosophy and Literature on page 338.

  PublisherDOI

• Securing the future in the anthropocene: A critical analysis of themillennium ecosystem assessment scenarios

  Elementa Science of the Anthropocene · 2018-05-18 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This commentary analyzes the ontological character of the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and its attempt to imagine business-as-usual and transformative human-environmental futures. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) constitutes the first and most significant attempt by an international political body to incorporate environmental concerns into the field of imaginative scenario building. In addition to its lengthy report on the threatened status of planetary ecosystems, the MA contains extensive “future scenarios” that imagine how human-environmental relations might unfold over the course of the twenty-first century. These scenarios arise out of the lineage of military scenarios generated during the Cold War, and continue to inform UN assessments in the present. This commentary explores how a politico-military concern for security informs the framework of the scenarios, and limits how the MA characterizes the fundamental human act of narration. In the process, the commentary explores alternative ontologies of narration and how these may lead to more transformative narratological interventions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reflections on the Anthropocene Dossier

  Modern fiction studies · 2018-01-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This introduction to the “Anthropocene Fictions” special issue of <i>MFS</i> discusses the need to theorize and expand what I call the “Anthropocene Dossier.” In addition to summarizing the essays of this issue, I explore Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s first article about the Anthropocene, the global scenarios of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the concept of planetary boundaries as developed by scientists working at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. I juxtapose these scientific works with recent Anthropocene research undertaken by scholars working in the humanities, notably Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

  PublisherDOI

• The Monstrous and the Secure

  2018-10-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Postcolonial theory and literary studies have a long history of exploring the tensions between techne and physis. The global initiative of England, Europe and America express an impulse to secure the Global South by ideologically transforming the complex heterogeneity of an ecosystem into a single “raw materiality” in need of technological “improvement”. Mr Holroyd’s logocentric “giving of the word for everything” is at one and the same time a form of monstrous-scale “worlding” of all the ecosystems of the planet. Joseph Conrad’s novel shows that the West’s destruction of the African ecosystem in the form of colonial rule is a symptom of the coming-to-rule of modern technologization. Marlow appears to have little enthusiasm for the modern ecosystem of London; it is described as little more than graveyard devastated by the processes of “cultivation/civilization”. “Resource,” like “ivory” in Heart of Darkness, is an allotrope for reterritorializing an ecosystem for the purposes of capitalist production and development in Nostromo.

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• An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie

  2016-03-08 · 31 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Enclosures, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe Syndrome: Notes Toward an Ontology of Land The Territorialization of Land Problematizing Enclosure in the Eighteenth-Century Inhabiting Land in the Age of Empire: Twentieth-Century Literature

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• The end(s) of immanence in the anthropocene: militarized ecologies and the future of Deleuzian thought

  Journal for Cultural Research · 2016-10-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Two features bear down fundamentally on our current historical occasion: structures of security, and breakdowns of planetary ecosystems. This essay argues that Deleuze is not only tracing a “geophilosophy” (that is, a nonhuman-centered theory of history that includes a geohistory of the planet) that moves from nomadic through State and finally through neoliberal forms that extend beyond the power of the State, but that he is also moving toward a theory of “control” that can teach us a great deal about the rise of the security society and its relation to the anthropocene. More specifically, this essay argues that philosophy is at a moment when the stakes of Deleuze’s conceptualizations of “immanence” have changed. This change hinges on the ecological circumstances of the twenty-first century – a set of conditions considerably underway, involving a course unlikely to change in time to reverse the seriousness of the situation (due in part to the supremacy of a self-destructive international neoliberal politics). The essay concludes by more sharply defining the workings of security in relation to immanence in the anthropocene.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Allison Carruth

  2 shared

• Alfred J. López

  2 shared

• John N. Duvall

  1 shared

• Paul Piper

  ResearchWorks (United States)

  1 shared

• William Ferris

  Virginia Tech

  1 shared

• David Moore

  Stockport College

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Securit…
• Postcolonial Literary Studies: the First 30 Years (Johns Hop…