Gretchen Ernster Henderson is the Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in Humanities. Based in the English Department at Rhodes College, her work in interdisciplinary humanities has been shaped by creative writing, environmental studies, cultural histories, art history and visual art, museum studies, comparative media, digital humanities, music, health humanities, integrative sciences, social work, and public humanities. Professor Henderson cross-pollinates creative and critical methods that have shaped her five books, intermedia arts, opera libretti, and field practices. She loves working with students across disciplines and engaging interdisciplinary research to seed regenerative questions that reimagine our senses of place in a more-than-human world. At Rhodes, she is teaching courses in Environmental Humanities, Blue Humanities, Contemplative Humanities, Creative Writing, and bridging disciplines through cross-curricular and community-engaged commitments.
Professor Henderson is leading a global collaboration called Dear Body of Water (in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center, and the national coalition of Poets for Science) a poetic water-harvesting project to renew care for watersheds. The “postcard” portal invites people to reflect on their ecological relationships by writing letters to bodies of water, while growing restoring and restorying activities around waterways. Between 2022-2025, her work has been supported through fellowships as a Lucas Artist Program Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center (CA), Artist-in-Residence at Fallingwater (PA), Interdisciplinary Arts Fellow at the University of Wyoming’s Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts (WY), Aldo & Estella Leopold Writer-in-Residence (NM), and Women’s International Studies Center Fellow. In 2025-2026, Professor Henderson is the Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellow at Harvard University. From December 2025-May 2026, she also has a solo exhibition at the Turchin Center for Visual Arts at Appalachian State University.
Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press 2023), blends literary environmental nonfiction, photography, film, and field practices. This book grew from her 2018-2019 Annie Clark Tanner Fellowship in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, where she focused on shifting climates in the American West. Intermedia works were published in Ecotone (Notable in Best American Essays 2020), Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands (Routledge), Landscape Architecture Plus/LA+, Holt-Smithson Foundation’s Scholarly Essays, Orion, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and exhibited in conjunction with the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and UC-Santa Barbara’s Platform Gallery. Some co-authored publications have included Nature Sustainabilityand Conservation Biology. These creative-critical commitments benefitted from her supported immersions at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature in Switzerland, Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, and Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities in Montana.
Professor Henderson’s four earlier books include two additional books of nonfiction and two novels, along with poetry chapbooks and digital arts projects. Her book on Ugliness: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books of London/University of Chicago Press 2015) was translated into five languages (Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Chinese, Arabic). Her lyric essay, On Marvellous Things Heard (Green Lantern Press 2011), explored interrelations of literature and music. Her arts-based novels include Galerie de Difformité (&NOW Books/Northwestern University Press 2011: Winner of the Madeleine Plonsker Prize) and The House Enters the Street (Starcherone Books 2012: runner-up for the AWP Award Series in the Novel). Her interviews have been featured on NPR, BBC Radio, and radio programs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Writing across genres, Professor Henderson has had work published in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Performance Research, The Journal of Artists’ Books, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability: Looking towards the Future, Arnoldia, Brevity, TSLL (awarded the 2025 Tony Hilfer Prize), and other journals and anthologies.
As a strong supporter of cultural heritage and communal memory, Professor Henderson’s work has grown through commitments with libraries, archives, museums, both bound and unbound cultural collections. Previously as Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, she curated a year-long initiative on “What is Research?” and, at Georgetown University, was Co-Director of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute on “Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere” in collaboration with the University of California-Santa Cruz, supporting undergraduate interdisciplinary faculty from around the country. Her invited lectures include Distinguished Speaker in Art History at Rutgers University, and her research in distinctive collections has been supported by the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellowship in Creative Arts at Brown University and Washington College, the William Elwood Fellowship in Civil Rights & African American Studies at the University of Virginia, the Mary Catherine Mooney Fellowship at the Boston Athenaeum, and an NEH Summer Institute in Greece. With a long commitment to Health Humanities and Disability Studies, she has also been an Artist in Residence at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, volunteer with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and other engagements.
With early training as a musician, Professor Henderson’s work as a librettist has been supported by Opera America and MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology and performed by ensembles including Roomful of Teeth, Pacific Chorale, The Thirteen, and San Diego State Wind Symphony. She undertakes vocal projects that aim to amplify underrepresented voices and women composers. Her training includes precollege certification from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, B.A. in History from Princeton University (summa cum laude), M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities from MIT.
A dedicated educator, Professor Henderson previously taught on faculty at The University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University, University of Utah, MIT, and other colleges. She also has been committed to teaching community-engaged workshops that cross-pollinate interdisciplinary practitioners across backgrounds, including through the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, University of Arizona Poetry Center, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the editorial collective of Randolph Lundine. She looks forward to offering workshops through Rhodes College’s Meeman Center. Before teaching in higher education, her career began as a high school teacher of English and History, piloting a program in American Studies rooted in Environmental Studies. She believes that education is a life-long process, in and beyond the classroom, holding seeds for imagining the future of the world. She encourages experiential learning and regularly offers reflective Seed Retreats, encouraging people to grow their imaginations like a garden, wherever you are.
Rooted in senses of place, Professor Henderson is interested in acoustic ecologies and communal practices of listening, meditation, and other reflective processes that support learning from each other to sound the gaps of cultural and institutional histories, to facilitate participatory spaces for exchanging ways of knowing to cultivate respect and reciprocity. Her relational understanding of “Humanities” grows from etymological roots shared with humanity, humane, humility, and humus—as in soil, or dust to dust—as humans are interrelated with Earth. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, Professor Henderson is grateful for her human, animal, and botanical family and all the places that have informed her sense of ecology, shaped by bodies of water that interconnect us with our planetary lifeblood, including the Memphis Aquifer and Mississippi River Watershed.
Professor Henderson’s website: gretchenhenderson.com
