By Kayla Murillo

After months of heavy interviewing and processing, Adelphi’s English department has hired Dr. Eric Dean Wilson as a new professor.

Dr. Wilson is an essayist and creative writer with a number of degrees. He earned a bachelor’s from Northwestern University, a master’s in creative writing from The New School and a doctorate in English with a certificate in American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, for his work in environmental literature. 

His dissertation titled, “The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological”  dives into how contemporary American essays from an ecological perspective can help people understand the boundaries of the self in literary nonfiction. It won the English Program’s Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year. Dr. Wilson fell into writing a book about air conditioning titled “After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort.” Through writing this book, he was taught about environmental theory and explored that aspect in literature. It explores the history of air-conditioning, climate science, road trips and philosophy to tell the life story of freon, the refrigerant that created a hole in the ozone layer larger than the United States of America. 

Currently, Dr. Wilson is increasingly writing more about queer literature and theory with an upcoming book titled, “Queer Woods: On the Nature of Cruising.” He described his vision for the novel as “exploring the idea of public sex in parks and looking at public spaces through queer ecological lenses to better understand how to share space with others.”

Previously, he was a teaching fellow in the Mellon seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research through the Center for Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. He also taught at Queens College, FIT, The New School, and Ramapo College. Dr. Wilson is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and American Literature at Wagner College located in Staten Island, and now a Professor of Creative Writing at Adelphi University. 

Wilson’s writing has appeared in numerous publications such as TIME, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among others. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he now resides in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Dr. Wilson will be teaching two courses this upcoming fall. Creative nonfiction in the MFA writing program (ENG 647) and Literature and Other Arts (ENG 267) for undergraduates. He imagines that the undergraduate course will be eco-themed and tied into environmental humanities. Students will read texts that are examples of obvious and not so obvious ecological issues in literature while also exploring other forms of art and how ecological literature is adapted in that way.

Dr. Wilson is looking forward to joining the Adelphi community because of its vibrance and openness to new ideas. Teaching on Long Island for the first time, he’s eager to learn new perspectives from a new set of students. He’s also eager to introduce students to ecological and queer literature and writing, and discuss why it’s an important topic. He said, “Through learning about these topics, you gain the power to change the narrative.”