Dominic Wilkins (he/him) is currently Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Environmental Studies at Berea College, a position he began in August 2025. He has also taught at Colorado College, where he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in 2024-25. Dominic earned his PhD from the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. An interdisciplinary scholar who draws from fields including political ecology; the environmental humanities; religion, nature, and culture; and social & cultural geography, his primary research examines how religious actors advance and frustrate efforts to achieve socio-ecological justice. Dominic’s empirical work largely focuses on the institutions, grassroots movements, and other communities within the Catholic Church. He has published in outlets including Environmental History, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Progress in Human Geography.
Dominic’s doctoral dissertation was titled Caring for Creation: Catholics, Justice, and Socio-Ecologies in Appalachia. Drawn from ethnographic research conducted at Nazareth Farm during the 2021-22 acdemic year, Caring for Creation examined the intentional community’s efforts to envision, teach, and enact socio-ecological justice. Throughout, Dominic assessed the challenges faced in seeking to teach and practice liberatory ways of living amidst landscapes dominated by natural gas extraction and associated capital accumulation, as well as the challenges associated with working for socio-ecological justice at narrow scales within a largely indifferent broader institutional context. Ultimately, this project delved into the nuances and tensions involved in effort to make the just worlds many of us imagine and desire materially take place in our lives and landscapes. Dominic is currently revising these findings as a book reflecting on the possibiliteis and limits of intentional communities as paths towrad justice.
Dominic Wilkins 