Jessica Galant, a Stanford junior, will be presenting an essay she wrote under the mentorship of PWR instructor Mark Feldman at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in December 2008 in San Francisco.

Galant will be presenting her essay, "Uniting for a Common Goal: The Interfaith Solution to Earth's Environmental Crisis,” on a panel called “Forgive Us Earth, for We Have Sinned: Environmentalism and Religion.”  In her work, she focuses on three groups: the Muslim Community Association of San Francisco, the San Francisco Zen center, and California Power and Light. In analyzing these groups together, she aims to promote environmental protection through interfaith efforts.  Ultimately, she argues, “any solution to our ecological crisis will need to be religious insofar as it must entail a transformation of attitudes and beliefs.”

This summer Galant will continue her work on urban ecology, conducting interviews, surveying secondary literature, and continuing her writing under the mentorship of Feldman.  Her plans after MLA include revising her paper for publication. “Keeping Tableaux Vivants Alive,” the essay she wrote in Feldman’s PWR 1 course, Speaking with Things: The Rhetoric of Display, won her the Boothe Prize for Excellence in First-Year Writing in Autumn 2006.