Christina Gerhardt is an author, academic and journalist. She has written on a range of subjects, including the environment, film and critical theory. She has been the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor of Environment and the Humanities at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University,[1] and held visiting positions at Harvard University,[2] the Free University of Berlin,[3] Columbia University and University of California at Berkeley,[4] where she taught previously and is now a permanent Senior Fellow. She has been awarded grants by the Fulbright Commission,[5] the DAAD, the National Endowment for the Humanities,[6] and the Newberry Library.[7] Her environmental journalism has been published (under Tina Gerhardt) in The Guardian, The Nation, Grist, Orion and Sierra Magazine, among other venues.
Gerhardt has made contributions to a number of fields, notably the environmental humanities, film studies and critical theory.
Professor Gerhardt is author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (University of California Press, 2023), which the New Scientist called one of the "best popular science books of 2023" and the LA Times called "a work of art." Sea Change was a California Book Award Silver Medal winner for Contribution to Publishing and a Nautilus Award Silver Medal winner in the category Ecology and Environment. She is a regular commentator on radio and has been featured on the BBC's World Service, CBC's The Current and NPR's 1A, among other radio programs and podcasts.
She is also Editor-in-Chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), published by Oxford University Press. Gerhardt has written about walking and experiential learning, civic engagement and citizen science; about human-animal-environment entanglement; about petro-cultures and petro-landscapes, e.g. plastic and the Pacific; about sea level rise and islands; and about future shorelines. She also uses site specific public art installations to foster civic engagement. She has led walking tours, with both classes and the public, revealing the past histories of urban landscapes, considering how the present-day environment came to be shaped, and imagining possible futures.
Gerhardt has written about new wave cinemas of the long sixties, including feminist and political cinema, about the representation of the Red Army Faction in film, about New German Cinema and the Berlin School, and about directors ranging from Helke Sander and Harun Farocki to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hito Steyerl.
Gerhardt has published on critical theory and on Theodor W. Adorno. Her writings examine the concept of nature and of animals in the writings of the Frankfurt School's first generation. She has published articles on Adorno and nature; on nature in Adorno and Kracauer; on animals and compassion in the writings of Adorno, Horkheimer and Schopenhauer; and on animals in Adorno, Cixous, Derrida and Levinas.