Heather Houser is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and holds affiliations with American Studies, the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, and the Environmental Science Institute. Houser's first book is "Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia UP, 2014)," which won the 2015 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Book Prize. Ecosickness argues that contemporary fiction uses affect to bring audiences to environmental consciousness through the sick body. She is currently working on a new project, titled "Environmental Art and the Infowhelm," that gives an account of the aesthetics of information management across environmental media.