Russell C. Powell
Russell C. Powell's research is on the religious, ethical, and political resonances of contemporary environmental issues, particularly the religious dimension of American environmental thought. Prior to joining the CSWR, he taught at Boston College as a Core Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Theology and Ethics. Russell earned his doctorate in the multidisciplinary Religion and Society program at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2019. He has held teaching positions at the College of the Holy Cross, Amherst College, and Princeton University, and served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Transcendence & Transformation research initiative at the CSWR from 2023-24.
Russell is currently completing a manuscript on the relevance of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking for environmental ethics and politics, provisionally entitled Nature Is a Language: Emerson's Ecological Ethics. As program specialist for the Thinking with Plants and Fungi research initiative at the CSWR in 2025, he served as editor (with Rachael Petersen and Natalia Schwien Scott) of Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World, an edited volume that will be published by the Center for the Study of World Religions in 2026.
Russell's research also examines the intersection of race, religion, and environment. With Rebecca Kneale Gould, he was editor of a two-volume special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, entitled "Ambiguous Legacies, Contested Futures" (2022), that reappraised various cornerstone American environmental thinkers in light of contemporary justice concerns. Russell serves as assistant editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture and edits the CSWR's Transcendentalism essay series.
Selected publications
"Environmental Justice, Tradition, and John Muir," Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 106, no. 2/3 (2025): 346-370.
"Environmentalism without Foundations: Climate Change, Mystical Experience, and the Challenge of Environmental Justice," Ethics & the Environment 29, no. 2 (2024): 57-88.
"Rejecting Racism, Restoring Intuition: John Muir, Sacred Value, and Romanticism," Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 16, no. 4 (2022): 447-470.
“Transforming Genius into Practical Power: Muir, Emerson, and Character’s Necessity in Environmental Politics,” Environmental Ethics 42, no. 1 (2020): 21-37.
“Shame, Moral Motivation, and Climate Change,” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 23, no. 3 (2019): 230-53.