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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).
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.
Affiliated Scholars
The lab is currently reaching out to 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!
Maria Larsson
Winter 2026-present
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, and spending time close to the ocean.
Lab Manager
Graduate Researchers
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!
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Emma Ridder
Fall 2025-present
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.
Emily Szpiro
Fall 2025-Spring 2026
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.
Student Interns
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Alexandra
Summer 2026-present
Alexandra is a 4th year Psychology and ELTS (European Languages and Transcultural Studies Department) Italian double major and Film and Television minor. She is interested in the ecology of urban environments and the cinematic and literary representations of these hybrid ecosystems.
Wai Yan Yap
Fall 2026-present
Wai is currently a senior Global Studies major at UCLA, born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His interests lie at the intersection of geopolitics, international economics, supply chains, and environmental and cultural integration. Driven by a desire to understand how resource management and broader dynamics impact global market stability, Wai wants to focus on the practical challenges of optimizing sustainable future global distribution networks and enhancing the field of applied research.
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Eva Philson
Fall 2025-Spring 2026
Environmental Science and ELTS (European Languages and Transcultural Studies Dept) French and Francophone double-major. She is interested in the ecology of human-dominated spaces and the socio-environmental dimensions of the urban environment.
Video Consultant
Tristan Lajarrige
Winter 2026-Present
Tristan Lajarrige is a visual artist from Montréal, Canada, currently based in Los Angeles. At the intersection of image-making and performance, his practice explores how technological mediation—particularly photography—shapes agency, memory, and embodied experience. Through the enactment of performative, conceptual, and satirical prompts, Lajarrige seeks to decelerate image production in order to foster heightened environmental awareness. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (2023) in Boston and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Concordia University (2021) in Montréal. He is currently working as the Studio Manager of sculptor David Altmejd.