Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a journalist-in-residence at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, a founder of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies in the IoES, and a senior fellow in UCLA’s cityLAB. He is a regular columnist at LA Observed and editor of Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly magazine published by the University of California Press, from 2013 to 2016. He is also a partner and strategic adviser at Stamen Design, an interactive design studio specializing in mapping, data visualization, and strategic communications.

Jon was executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, an interdisciplinary center for research, teaching, new media, and journalism at Stanford University before coming to UCLA. He has been an environmental journalist and science writer for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows. He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003 and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004, before returning to Stanford to work on a Ph.D. in environmental history and the history of science.

He is currently finishing a book entitled “Critical Habitat: A History of Thinking with Things in Nature” and is engaged in a multidisciplinary digital environmental humanities research project on nature in cities. And he is a co-coordinator of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Environmental Humanities: Emergence and Impacts,” which met throughout the 2014-2015 academic year at UCLA, is continuing in 2015-2016, and will result in A Companion to the Environmental Humanities, an edited volume of essays to be published by Routledge.