Cultural ecologist, geophilosopher, and performance artist.
Dr. David Abram is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon, 2010), and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1997).
Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work has helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. A recipient of various fellowships and awards, including the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo in Norway.
For the 2022-2023 academic year, Dr. Abram is the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. His work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. A leading proponent of the more-than-human turn across multiple disciplines, in 1991 David coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind (and all our cultural productions), yet always necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up as part of the lingua franca of the broad movement for ecological sanity.
