George Handley

Biography:

My research and teaching focus on environmental humanities. My undergraduate and graduate training in comparative literature focused on the literatures of the Americas, with a special interest in comparing how the history of slavery was imagined in novels from the US and the Caribbean. I then ventured into the emerging field of ecocriticism and published work in postcolonial ecocriticism. After being hired at BYU in 1998 I also began writing about Mormonism and environmental values, leading to a sustained interest in theology in its relationship to environmental attitudes and to literature itself. I publish in literary criticism, public humanities, Mormon Studies, and as a creative writer.

I have previously served as Department Chair, Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, and Associate Director of the Faculty Center. I am the past co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), founding president of Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, co-founder of LDS Earth Stewardship, and the designer of the College of Humanities Humanities and Belief Workshop for graduate students in the humanities. I currently serve as the coordinator for the Global Environmental Studies minor in the Kennedy Center and in the community as a member of the Provo City Council. I am planning a GE study abroad in Latin America for the winter of 2026.

My wife, Amy, is a nurse practitioner in oncology and together we have raised four children and now have four grandchildren. When I am not otherwise engaged, I enjoy family time, serving in the church, as well as flyfishing, hiking, and biking.

Degrees:

BA in comparative literature, Stanford University
MA and PhD in comparative literature, University of California, Berkeley

Books Authored:

Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos (Routledge, 2024)
Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator (University of Illinois Press, 2023)
The Hope of Nature: Our Care for God's Creations (Maxwell Institute, 2020)
If Truth Were a Child (Maxwell Institute, 2019)
Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-authored with Greg Garrard, Axel Goodbody, and Stephanie Posthumus
American Fork (novel, John Hunt, 2018)
Learning to Like Life: A Tribute to Lowell Bennion (creative nonfiction, self-published, 2017)
Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River (memoir, University of Utah Press, 2010)
New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (University of Georgia Press, 2007)
Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (University of Virginia Press, 2001)

Books Edited:

Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. With Elizabeth DeLoughrey (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Stewardship and the Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment. With Terry Ball and Steven Peck (Religious Studies Center, 2006)
Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. With Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Renée Gosson (University of Virginia Press, 2005)