E CRAM

E Cram is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Their research explores how race, gender, sexuality, and disability in North America shape environmental relations through practices of violence, property, work, and health. Their areas of expertise span queer ecologies, queer theory, disability studies, settler colonialisms, environmental and energy cultural studies, and publicly engaged collaborative scholarship. They also serve as an Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies & Communication.  

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Their first book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, Energy and the Making of the North American West (University of California Press, 2022), reads the history of sexuality in the United States as a story about energy. By revisiting archives and public encounters with sites of settler colonialism and state violence across the North American West, Cram maps networks of capacity building that made possible both the production of bodily vitality and the exhaustion of racialized populations. Aimed at scholars in queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities, the book gives a grounded account of why racialized sexualities matter for understanding the legacies of violence in the making of environments and energy cultures.

Current research takes up questions of queer, trans, and disability climate futures. This work includes the podcast Disability Ecologies of Care and Memory and a book project on the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm.  

Future projects also include The Abundant Ecologies Collaborative with Prof. Constance Gordon (San Francisco State University), a project tracing vernaculars of abundance across several spheres of environmental organizing.