ABOUT
ISLAND VIEW MEDIA
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About
Robert Louis Chianese has a B. A. from Rutgers University (1964), and a
M. A. and Ph. D. from Washington University, St. Louis, (1971).
Chianese, an Emeritus Professor at California State University, Northridge, taught in the English Department for forty years (1969-2009). He developed numerous interdisciplinary courses, linking literature and the humanities with areas such as history, art, sociology, psychology, ecology, religious studies, and philosophy. He was awarded the university-wide Outstanding Faculty Award in 2003. He was a founding faculty of what would become California State University Channel Islands.
Photo (and drawing) by Robert Engel
Chianese won three Fulbright scholar awards, to Plovdiv Bulgaria and Shanghai China, teaching environmental literature and is a Fulbright Senior Specialist. He taught in CSUN's London Semester and has lectured in Austria and at various universities in China.
He won a Mitchell Prize for Sustainable Strategies for the Future in 1979. He has developed student assessment materials through a Rand Corporation project.
Over the last fifteen years he has organized symposia linking literature and the arts with science at the annual meetings of the hundred-year-old American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division. He is the only non-scientist President of this organization. He co-curated an exhibition of “Art Inspired by Science” in 2010, and in 2012 the AAAS-PD published his book Art Inspired by Science, interpreting the works in the exhibit.
He is a columnist for the American Scientist magazine.
Chianese has published scholarly articles, advocacy essays, and numerous poems, which he often illustrates. He publishes book-length collections of his poetry often with original photographs and the work of local artists.
Originally from Trenton, New Jersey, Chianese (b. 1942) lives in Ventura, California with Paula, his partner since 1964; they have two children and four grandchildren. He is an active volunteer in environmental and arts organizations.
You can visit two other of his websites:
Environmental Ventura collects his essays on local environmental issues: https://www.environmentalventura.com/
Cruel Season records a fire and drought art exhibit at MVC with his works : https://rlchianese.wixsite.com/cruelseason