Jenny Price
2014 Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities and Guest Artist at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University
Biography
Price, an environmental historian and writer, has been a Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Women at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1998. Her body of work contains several publications including the book Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999) and the book chapters, ‘Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company’ in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (1995) and ‘A Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo’ in The Nature of Nature: New Essays from America’s Finest Writers on Nature (1994). Price recently began writing a satirical environmental advice column, ‘Green Me Up, JJ’, for LA Observed, and is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times, GOOD, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times. Additionally, Price gives tours of the Los Angeles River on her own and as part of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, an art-performance educational group co-founded by Price in 2004.
While at Princeton
While at Princeton, Price taught an interdisciplinary course called The Environment Can Be Funny that explored the intersection of the environment and comedy. Price challenged her students to analyze and demonstrate how satire, sarcasm, and comedy of all stripes can be used to explore, and poke fun at, environmental issues. She also organized “That’s Not Funny” a panel on environmental comedy bringing 3 environmental comedians to campus. She also organized a three part seminar series “What the Arts & Humanities are Good For” that included “What History is Good For”, What Literature is Good For” and “What Arts are Good For.” The seminar series explored the particular powers of history, literature, and the arts and integrated these powers with those of the sciences and social sciences, through intensely interdisciplinary discussions.