Experts at Empire State College

Eric Zencey
Visiting Associate Professor of Historical and Political Studies, Contributing Editor, North American Review
Saratoga Springs, NY

Expertise

• Social, political, and ecological implications of thermodynamics
• Energy futures and peak oil
• Ecological literacy
• Ecological foundations of political systems
• Environmental History
• Creative nonfiction and memoir
• Historical fiction

Profile

Eric Zencey is a visiting associate professor of historical and political studies in the Graduate Programs and Center for International Programs at Empire State College. An internationally acclaimed and nationally best-selling novelist, he is also a contributing editor to the North American Review and a contributor to the online Encyclopedia of Earth. With degrees in political philosophy, economics, and the history of science, Zencey has lectured widely on the political and social implications of the laws of thermodynamics; on the failure of mainstream economics to credit natural law, including the law of entropy; on environmental literacy and education; on the historical and philosophical roots of unsustainable environmental practice; and on the difficult transition democratic nations will face in moving from an era of cheap energy and exponential economic growth to a an era of sustainable systems operating within ecological limits and physical realities. An accomplished practitioner of both literary fiction and literary nonfiction, Zencey’s work has been published in 13 foreign languages, and his thinking and writing about the intersection of political theory, science, and nature has been supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Bogliasco Foundations.

Zencey has taught at Goddard College, Vermont College, Empire State College, the University of New York in Prague and the University of New York in Tirana. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, The North American Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and in various scholarly journals. He is author of the novel Panama (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) and a collection of essays about how we think about nature, Virgin Forest (University of Georgia Press, 1997). He splits his time between his home in Vermont and St. Louis, where his wife, the novelist Kathryn Davis, is the senior writer in residence at Washington University.