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Multispecies Futures Lab
Ecocultural Wellbeing and Kinship in the Cybercene
Welcome!
This transdisciplinary lab sits at the productive contact-zone between the Environmental and Digital Humanities.
The primary questions that guide our activities are:
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How has the global digital media revolution transformed our relationships with lives, bodies and ecocultural systems?
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Given these profound transformations how can we imagine, create and restore harmonious and thriving multispecies "naturalcultural" communities regionally, nationally and globally?
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Please see our PROJECTS tab to explore the diversity and the global reach of our work.
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Our initiatives are arranged within two general clusters:Multispecies Studies and Cybercene Studies.​​ CLICK HERE to get an overview of the intellectual and methodological ecosystem that undergirds the lab's projects.
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For latest news on initiatives and events, please check us out on Instagram!
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Meet the Multispecies Futures Team!
P.I./Faculty Director
Dr. Vetri Nathan
Associate Professor
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS)
University of California, Los Angeles
Vetri Nathan's research and teaching interests include the Environmental and Digital Humanities, Mobilities/Migrations/ Diasporic Cultures, Food and Cinema Studies.
His forthcoming book project "Our Multispecies Futures: Control, Care and Kinship in a Transformed World" takes an unusual pathway to being researched and written, as it is intimately entangled with the birth and research activities of this new lab.
Dr. Nathan holds his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009). Prior to joining the University of California in 2024, Professor Nathan taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston (2011-21) and at Rutgers University (2022-24).
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Via this lab, his research mostly centers around cultural and ecocultural hybridity, mobilities, interconnectedness and multispecies wellbeing via the relatively new field of the "multispecies humanities."
His initial research focused specifically on Italy's fraught response to migration from the Global South of the world. His first book, Marvelous Bodies: Italy's New Migrant Cinema (2017, Purdue University Press) explores thirteen key full-length Italian movies released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. He continues to explore questions related to ecocultural diversity and sustainability in Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean.
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Affiliated Scholars
The lab is currently reaching out a diverse and global group of transdisciplinary researchers as lab affiliates. These affiliated members will provide intellectual and practical insights, advice and points of collaboration in different ways. We will be growing this collective in the coming months!
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Lab Manager
Maria Larsson
Maria is a doctoral student in the ELTS department. Her work centers on science fiction, with a particular focus on Norwegian and broader Scandinavian speculative literature. Her research examines how these regional forms of science fiction engage questions of culture, identity, and social imagination within a minor-literature framework. Outside of academia, she enjoys surfing, the ocean more broadly, and, of course, reading science fiction!
Graduate Research Assistants
Student research training is fundamental to the work of the lab. As funding allows, we seek to have an interdisciplinary range of graduate students/early researchers work towards innovative research pathways here at the Multispecies Futures Lab!
2025-26's two graduate RA positions were made possible thanks to generous funding from UCLA Humanities Technology (HumTech)!
Emily Szpiro
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Emily Szpiro is currently an English Ph.D. student at UCLA. Previously, she lived in Montreal, where she received her B.A. and M.A. at McGill University. She works predominantly with modernist authors such as Virgina Woolf, H.D., and Gertrude Stein to think about the porousness and sensitivity of the sick body at the intersection of its environment and, in doing so, explore the potential of the novel’s experimental aesthetics.
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Emma Ridder
Emma Ridder (with her rescue dog Harry in pic), is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at UCLA. Her research centers on twentieth-century literature and film, film theory and visual culture studies, and affect studies. She is working on a dissertation titled “Distasteful Sights: On Disgust and Film Form," which examines cinematic elicitations and explorations of disgust that draw upon and underscore the hapticity of the medium.
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