Rate My Professor Kathryn Maggiulli

During her time at the University of Oregon, Maggiulli served as a Graduate Research Fellow at the Wayne Morse Center for International and Area Studies in Environmental Studies and English. Her fellowship project, titled “Synthetic Biology, Gene Drives, and the Ethics of Manipulating Evolutionary Processes for Conservation Goals,” examined the ethical challenges posed by synthetic biology in biodiversity conservation policy, including its role in public policy and long-term impacts on biodiversity. Key publications include her 2022 article “Teaching invasive species ethically: using comics to resist metaphors of moral wrongdoing & build literacy in environmental ethics” in Environmental Education Research. In this peer-reviewed paper, she critiques the prevalent moralistic framing of invasive species as "evil" invaders, which oversimplifies ecological dynamics and echoes problematic social discourses, advocating instead for comics-based pedagogy to cultivate nuanced ethical reasoning and literacy in environmental decision-making. She also co-authored “Remembering the Future: Natural Disaster, Place, and Symbolic Capital in Tōhoku, Japan” published in Rural Sociology in 2018, which qualitatively analyzes how residents in the Tōhoku region envision future risks following the 2011 disaster. Additionally, she contributed to the 2019 collective annotation of Helena Maria Viramontes’ novel “Under the Feet of Jesus.” Maggiulli's scholarship has influenced discussions in environmental literature and ethics, with presentations such as her 2023 talk at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference on policing species borders in conservation practices. She currently serves as Assistant Teaching Professor in Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University.