Andrew Wingfield, MFA

Andrew Wingfield, MFA

Associate Professor, School of Integrative Studiess

Faculty Directory

Research Focus

My main interest as a writer is exploring the ways that people and places shape each other. My 2005 novel, Hear Him Roar, dramatizes human-mountain lion interactions to assess the environmental and social costs of suburban development in California. All of the stories in my award-winning 2010 collection, Right of Way, are set in one gentrifying urban neighborhood. I am currently collaborating with ethnobiologist Dr. Michael Gilmore on nonfiction narratives that explore the rich and complex relationship members of the Maijuna indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon have with their ancestral rainforest landscape. This work studies and celebrates the deep linkages between biological and cultural diversity and underscores the importance of sustaining not only Earth’s biosphere, but also its ethnosphere.

Current Projects

■ The Reader of Currents: A Place-Based Biography of an Amazonian Indigenous Leader is a booklength biographical study of a 67-year-old leader of the Maijuna indigenous group in northeastern Peru. The life story of Sebastián Ríos Ochoa is considered in the context of Maijuna ethnohistory and the larger history of indigenous peoples in Amazonia since European contact. The project, a collaboration with Dr. Michael Gilmore, involves place-based ethnographic research as well as study of scholarly and archival materials.

Select Publications

■ Wingfield, A. and M.P. Gilmore. (2020). Three days of masato. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27(2), 406-415.

■ Bowler, M. T., B. M. Griffiths, M. P. Gilmore, A. Wingfield, and M. Recharte. (2018). Potentially infanticidal behavior in the Amazon river dolphin (Iniageoffrensis). Acta Ethologica 21(2), 141-145.

■ Wingfield, A. (2017). Back to Middle Earth. Carve Fall, 85-92.

Contact

Phone: 703-625-2348

Email: awingfie@gmu.edu

Website: https://integrative.gmu.edu/people/awingfie