Green BAAS is the environmental and sustainability network of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). It was founded in 2019 to respond to increasing concerns about the environment and the United States’ relationship to climate change, and to consider and direct the changes that BAAS can make to contribute to collective global climate action.
It is co-led by Dr Elsa Devienne (Northumbria University) and Dr Rebecca Tillett (University of East Anglia).
All BAAS members are welcome to join our steering committee and/or the Green BAAS mailing list. Please email us at green@baas.ac.uk for more information.
Green BAAS has three main goals:
- Greening American Studies Teaching
BAAS has taken active steps to develop environmental teaching in American Studies. A roundtable on “Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis” was edited by Eithne Quinn and published in the Journal of American Studies in 2021. Another roundtable on the need to centre environmental justice in the American Studies curriculum was edited by Elsa Devienne and published open-access in Transatlantica (2022) under the title “CODE RED for American Studies: Embedding Climate and Environmental Justice in the American Studies Curriculum” with contributions by Philip J. Deloria, Rebecca Macklin, Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason Molesky, and Julie Sze.
Our latest initiative is an Environmental Teaching Audit (October 2025). Thanks to the hard work of GREEN BAAS member and Hull PhD student Sam Hawksford White, we are pleased to share this report which investigates academics’ current practices and experiences of teaching about the US environment in UK Higher Education (in or beyond American studies programmes).
- Greening American Studies Research
In 2025, Rebecca Tillett edited a special issue of New Area Studies on Environmental American Studies with a preface by Lydia Plath and articles on the concept of kinship time in Indigenous writing, flood photography, W.E.B Du Bois and Environmental thought, and Indigenous land ethics. We continue to support the development of environmental work in American Studies through our ongoing roundtable series.
- Greening (or “decarbonising”) BAAS, the organisation
At our 2024 AGM, during the first BAAS conference organised online purely for environmental reasons, we launched our first ever Climate Action Plan, which will be revised regularly to reflect our ongoing and future commitments to global climate action. Do send your suggestions and remarks to our co-leads. We also published a statement on digital conferences, which we used as a basis to start a conversation with the BAAS membership about alternating between on-site and online conferences. This helped build a consensus towards our new guidelines for annual conferences: from 2024 onwards, one every three BAAS conferences will be held exclusively online to lower the carbon footprint of our activities. This means that while BAAS 2025 and 2026 will be held on-site, BAAS 2027 will be an online conference, offering opportunities to explore new ways to connect, present and network.