Xiumei Pu
She/Her/Hers
FULL-TIME FacultyAssociate Professor
Environmental Studies
Phone: 801.832.2402
Email: xpu@westminsteru.edu
Office Location: Foster Hall 102
Office Hours: F 2:30–4:30 p.m.
Degrees:
Ph.D. University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
M.A. Sichuan University
B.A. Sichuan Normal University
M.A. Georgia State University
About
Xiumei Pu joined the Environmental Studies Department in the fall of 2016. Her teaching
and research have been at the confluence of feminist studies and environmental humanities.
Her teaching interweaves a multitude of thematic threads such as environmental justice,
climate resilience, gender and the environment, indigenous environmental thought,
U.S. multiethnic environmental literature, Asian and Asian American environmental
literature, ecowomanist and ecofeminist theories, and creative activism. Her interests
have recently expanded to include environmental public humanities, digital environmental
humanities, U.S. West, nature photography, and creative nature writing. Always evolving,
her teaching and research pivot around environmental justice and resilience.
She is the author of “Turning Weapons into Flowers: Ecospiritual Poetics and Politics
of Bön and Ecowomanism” and a number of writings on transcultural understanding of
gender and the environment. She has collaborated on several publications with Dong
Isbister and Stephen Rachman, including Chinese Women Writers on the Environment:
A Multi-Ethnic Anthology of Fiction and Nonfiction, “Blurred Centers/Margins: Ethnobotanical
Healing in Writings by Ethnic Minority Women in China”, and "(Re) connecting People
and the Land: Ecomemory in Environmental Writings by Ethnic Minority Women Writers
in China". In collaboration with her colleagues Brent Olson and Erin Coleman Serrano,
the Institute for Mountain Research and Promise South Salt Lake, she is the recipient
of a Public Engagement Seed Grant from the Whiting Foundation for the project “Mountains
and Stories: Building Community among Asian and Pacific Islander Refugee and Immigrant
Families in Salt Lake Valley”. She is currently working on a book manuscript Spiritual
Ecology: Earth Healing and Cultural Continuance on a Warming Planet (working title).
The manuscript is grounded in her research on climate resilience and hope, traditional
ecological knowledge and wisdom, and her ethnographic research on indigenous Chinese
and Tibetan spiritual traditions in Western China.
