Meet Our Core Group

Lauret Savoy

Dr. Lauret Edith Savoy is a Professor of Environmental Studies & Geology at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. Her work explores how braided strands of human history and geologic-natural history contribute to stories we tell of land’s origin and history, and to stories we tell of ourselves in the land and of relational identity. This work and much of her adult life draw from questioning how to put the accumulated and eroded world into language, to re-memberfragmented pasts-into-present. As a woman bearing the blood of Africa, Europe, and Native America, she has needed to write toward the hybrid, liminal, and unconcluded to understand what it means to be a citizen of this country. Who, as an academic trained in the geosciences, has created stories of land history but knows little of her own familial past. For her this writing is seeking home among ruins and traces—excavating, unerasing, unforgetting.

Lauret considers herself both a collector and an arrangement. She might gather stones, or books, or mementos on purpose, but her own experiences and memories are gathered up and swept along by currents of America’s still unfolding history on this vast continent. To live here is to be marked by the land, by the presence of the past, and by countless selective silences of public memory.

Lauret co-edited with Alison Hawthorne Deming The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2011). She also compiled and edited Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (with Eldridge and Judy Moores), and co-authored Living with the Changing California Coast (with Gary Griggs and Kiki Patsch).

Lauret’s recent writings have appeared in journals such as the Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, and Orion, and in books such as Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. She is currently writing a book that seeks to engage dialogue on often unacknowledged intersections of public history, memory, “race,” and environmental awareness.

Lauret has held a Smithsonian Institution Faculty Fellowship and an Alexander Vietor Fellowship at Yale University, and she is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.