Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
Biographic Data
| ID | 655396 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Schneider-Mayerson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Schneider-Mayerson |
| SIGNATURE | SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale-NUS College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7848-0759 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 185 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
To Delight and Misinstruct
How has contemporary literature responded to, helped mitigate, or exacerbated the climate and nature crises? To begin answering this question systematically, we developed the Strategic Environmental Narratives codebook and applied it to 474 short stories published between 2014 and 2023 in The New Yorker, the most prestigious Anglophone literary magazine. We find that climate change exists in just 10.1% of these stories and freshwater pollution, m…
The Presence and Portrayal of Climate Change and Other Environmental Problems in Popular Films
How have popular films responded to – or avoided – the climate and nature crises? To begin to answer this question systematically, quantitative content analysis was applied to 250 of the most-rated fictional films on IMDb that were released between 2013 and 2022. We found that climate change existed in 12.8% of these films, while a global environmental problem (climate change, freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, …
The role of hope and fear in the impact of climate fiction on climate action intentions
Environmental Literature as Persuasion
Literary works of fiction about climate change are becoming more common and more popular among critics and readers. While much research has indicated the persuasive effectiveness of narrative storytelling in general, empirical research has not yet tested the effects of reading climate fiction. This paper reports results from the first experimental study to test the immediate and delayed impacts of climate fiction on readers’ beliefs and attitudes…
Empirical Ecocriticism
The reproductive climate concerns of young, educated Chinese
An emerging area of research concerns the phenomenon of young people factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices, but existing scholarship and popular discourse have focused exclusively on Western and developed countries. This paper examines whether young people in China are also connecting their reproductive plans and choices to climate change, and why. Based on the quantitative and qualitative results from an exploratory …
The environmental politics of reproductive choices in the age of climate change
The ethics of having children in the age of climate change is increasingly being discussed, but the political dimensions of individual reproductive choices in relation to climate change have been almost entirely ignored. This lacuna is addressed by drawing on a survey of 607 climate leftists who were factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices. Using a grounded theory approach, it identifies four dimensions of the connectio…
Nature, disappeared
As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore’s nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray huma…
Eco-reproductive concerns in the age of climate change
Empirical Ecocriticism
Since its inception, ecocriticism has been premised on the assumption that the texts it studies have a significant impact on readers and the world at large.In her introduction to the seminal Ecocriticism Reader (1996), Cheryll Glotfelty asserted that one of the typical questions posed by ecocritics is "How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?"(xix).In Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992), Scott Slovic explore…
Performative Pedagogy
Performative PedagogyModeling Affect and Action in Climate Change Courses Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Given the widespread uncertainty about how we ought to respond to climate change, instructors inevitably serve as models for their students. The scope of this modeling is greater than we tend to admit, extending from framing to behavior to affect. If this is the case—if all pedagogy is performative and affect is always a component of learnin…
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Ecotopian Lexicon
The Influence of Climate Fiction
Climate fiction—literature explicitly focused on climate change—has exploded over the last decade, and is often assumed to have a positive ecopolitical influence by enabling readers to imagine potential climate futures and persuading them of the gravity and urgency of climate change. Does it succeed? And whom does it reach? A qualitative survey of 161 American readers of 19 works of climate fiction finds that these readers are younger, more liber…
Some Islands Will Rise
Some Islands Will RiseSingapore in the Anthropocene Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Reading Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here in a course on environmental literature at Yale-NUS College, my students and I couldn't help wonder: what will the future hold for Singapore? Here shows the view from a fixed perspective and location (Perth Amboy, New Jersey) across eons, ranging from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 22,175 AD. In 2111, water pours through the win…
Paradoxical Infrastructures
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Necrocracy in America
Necrocracy in America: American Studies Begins to Address Fossil Fuels and Climate Change Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Oil Culture. Edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 456pages. $90.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper). Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. By Stephanie LeMenager. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 263pages. $49.95 (cloth). Routes of Power: Energy and Modern…
Disaster Movies and the ‘Peak Oil’ Movement
Using two large-scale surveys, I argue that the prevalence of apocalyptic popular culture influences apocalyptic beliefs in the United States. I focus especially on Hollywood disaster movies of the 1990s and 2000s, most of which deal with environmental themes, and participants in the ‘peak oil’ movement, a quasi-religious American apocalyptic social movement organized around a vision of energy depletion and social collapse. In these surveys, ‘pea…
From politics to prophecy
Adherents of the ‘peak-oil’ theory believe that resource depletion will cause an imminent social collapse that will lead to a simpler and more environmentally balanced world. Although American ‘peakists’ are extremely concerned with environmental issues, their awareness of the scale of ecological crises (such as climate change), gloomy evaluation of the state of American environmental politics, and vision of a post-apocalyptic future lead them to…
The Dan Brown Phenomenon
Despite the immense and lasting success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as both a novel and a broader cultural phenomenon, few scholars have attempted to explain its very popularity. Using a cultural-historical lens, this essay argues that the success of Brown's narrative should be understood as a reflection of some of the major political themes in the post-9/11 United States: the secrecy and deceptions of the George W. Bush administration and t…
Paradoxical Infrastructures
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Some Islands Will Rise
Some Islands Will RiseSingapore in the Anthropocene Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Reading Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here in a course on environmental literature at Yale-NUS College, my students and I couldn't help wonder: what will the future hold for Singapore? Here shows the view from a fixed perspective and location (Perth Amboy, New Jersey) across eons, ranging from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 22,175 AD. In 2111, water pours through the win…
The environmental politics of reproductive choices in the age of climate change
The ethics of having children in the age of climate change is increasingly being discussed, but the political dimensions of individual reproductive choices in relation to climate change have been almost entirely ignored. This lacuna is addressed by drawing on a survey of 607 climate leftists who were factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices. Using a grounded theory approach, it identifies four dimensions of the connectio…
Empirical Ecocriticism
Since its inception, ecocriticism has been premised on the assumption that the texts it studies have a significant impact on readers and the world at large.In her introduction to the seminal Ecocriticism Reader (1996), Cheryll Glotfelty asserted that one of the typical questions posed by ecocritics is "How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?"(xix).In Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992), Scott Slovic explore…
The reproductive climate concerns of young, educated Chinese
An emerging area of research concerns the phenomenon of young people factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices, but existing scholarship and popular discourse have focused exclusively on Western and developed countries. This paper examines whether young people in China are also connecting their reproductive plans and choices to climate change, and why. Based on the quantitative and qualitative results from an exploratory …
Nature, disappeared
As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore’s nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray huma…
Necrocracy in America
Necrocracy in America: American Studies Begins to Address Fossil Fuels and Climate Change Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Oil Culture. Edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 456pages. $90.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper). Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. By Stephanie LeMenager. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 263pages. $49.95 (cloth). Routes of Power: Energy and Modern…
From politics to prophecy
Adherents of the ‘peak-oil’ theory believe that resource depletion will cause an imminent social collapse that will lead to a simpler and more environmentally balanced world. Although American ‘peakists’ are extremely concerned with environmental issues, their awareness of the scale of ecological crises (such as climate change), gloomy evaluation of the state of American environmental politics, and vision of a post-apocalyptic future lead them to…
The Dan Brown Phenomenon
Despite the immense and lasting success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as both a novel and a broader cultural phenomenon, few scholars have attempted to explain its very popularity. Using a cultural-historical lens, this essay argues that the success of Brown's narrative should be understood as a reflection of some of the major political themes in the post-9/11 United States: the secrecy and deceptions of the George W. Bush administration and t…
Disaster Movies and the ‘Peak Oil’ Movement
Using two large-scale surveys, I argue that the prevalence of apocalyptic popular culture influences apocalyptic beliefs in the United States. I focus especially on Hollywood disaster movies of the 1990s and 2000s, most of which deal with environmental themes, and participants in the ‘peak oil’ movement, a quasi-religious American apocalyptic social movement organized around a vision of energy depletion and social collapse. In these surveys, ‘pea…
From politics to prophecy
Adherents of the ‘peak-oil’ theory believe that resource depletion will cause an imminent social collapse that will lead to a simpler and more environmentally balanced world. Although American ‘peakists’ are extremely concerned with environmental issues, their awareness of the scale of ecological crises (such as climate change), gloomy evaluation of the state of American environmental politics, and vision of a post-apocalyptic future lead them to…
Necrocracy in America
Necrocracy in America: American Studies Begins to Address Fossil Fuels and Climate Change Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Oil Culture. Edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 456pages. $90.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper). Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. By Stephanie LeMenager. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 263pages. $49.95 (cloth). Routes of Power: Energy and Modern…
Paradoxical Infrastructures
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
Some Islands Will Rise
Some Islands Will RiseSingapore in the Anthropocene Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Reading Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here in a course on environmental literature at Yale-NUS College, my students and I couldn't help wonder: what will the future hold for Singapore? Here shows the view from a fixed perspective and location (Perth Amboy, New Jersey) across eons, ranging from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 22,175 AD. In 2111, water pours through the win…
The Influence of Climate Fiction
Climate fiction—literature explicitly focused on climate change—has exploded over the last decade, and is often assumed to have a positive ecopolitical influence by enabling readers to imagine potential climate futures and persuading them of the gravity and urgency of climate change. Does it succeed? And whom does it reach? A qualitative survey of 161 American readers of 19 works of climate fiction finds that these readers are younger, more liber…
Teaching the Environmental Humanities
This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and pedagogical contexts. The second part is a critic…
Ecotopian Lexicon
Eco-reproductive concerns in the age of climate change
Empirical Ecocriticism
Since its inception, ecocriticism has been premised on the assumption that the texts it studies have a significant impact on readers and the world at large.In her introduction to the seminal Ecocriticism Reader (1996), Cheryll Glotfelty asserted that one of the typical questions posed by ecocritics is "How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?"(xix).In Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992), Scott Slovic explore…
Performative Pedagogy
Performative PedagogyModeling Affect and Action in Climate Change Courses Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (bio) Given the widespread uncertainty about how we ought to respond to climate change, instructors inevitably serve as models for their students. The scope of this modeling is greater than we tend to admit, extending from framing to behavior to affect. If this is the case—if all pedagogy is performative and affect is always a component of learnin…
Nature, disappeared
As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore’s nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray huma…
The reproductive climate concerns of young, educated Chinese
An emerging area of research concerns the phenomenon of young people factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices, but existing scholarship and popular discourse have focused exclusively on Western and developed countries. This paper examines whether young people in China are also connecting their reproductive plans and choices to climate change, and why. Based on the quantitative and qualitative results from an exploratory …
The environmental politics of reproductive choices in the age of climate change
The ethics of having children in the age of climate change is increasingly being discussed, but the political dimensions of individual reproductive choices in relation to climate change have been almost entirely ignored. This lacuna is addressed by drawing on a survey of 607 climate leftists who were factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices. Using a grounded theory approach, it identifies four dimensions of the connectio…
Environmental Literature as Persuasion
Literary works of fiction about climate change are becoming more common and more popular among critics and readers. While much research has indicated the persuasive effectiveness of narrative storytelling in general, empirical research has not yet tested the effects of reading climate fiction. This paper reports results from the first experimental study to test the immediate and delayed impacts of climate fiction on readers’ beliefs and attitudes…
Empirical Ecocriticism
The Presence and Portrayal of Climate Change and Other Environmental Problems in Popular Films
How have popular films responded to – or avoided – the climate and nature crises? To begin to answer this question systematically, quantitative content analysis was applied to 250 of the most-rated fictional films on IMDb that were released between 2013 and 2022. We found that climate change existed in 12.8% of these films, while a global environmental problem (climate change, freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, …
The role of hope and fear in the impact of climate fiction on climate action intentions
To Delight and Misinstruct
How has contemporary literature responded to, helped mitigate, or exacerbated the climate and nature crises? To begin answering this question systematically, we developed the Strategic Environmental Narratives codebook and applied it to 474 short stories published between 2014 and 2023 in The New Yorker, the most prestigious Anglophone literary magazine. We find that climate change exists in just 10.1% of these stories and freshwater pollution, m…
Climate change (11 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Environmental ethics (7 works) · History (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature (6 works) · Ecology (6 works) · Law (6 works)