E Cram is an interdisciplinary scholar and Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Their primary area of research includes how race, gender, sexuality, and disability in North America shape environmental relationships. Cram’s expertise includes queer and disability ecologies, queer & trans public culture, environmental cultural studies, and publicly engaged scholarship. They are an Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies & Communication.  

Cram’s award winning first book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, Energy and the Making of the North American West (University of California Press, 2022), examines the history of sexuality in the United States and Canada as a story about cultures of energy. Re-reading archives of and public encounters with sites of state violence and settler colonialism throughout the region of the North American West, Cram traces networks of capacity building that constituted hierarchies of life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Written for scholars in queer studies and the environmental/energy humanities, this book highlights how various regional communities engage cultural and environmental legacies of harm to reimagine violent ecologies through practices of care, healing, and regeneration. Violent Inheritance is the awardee of the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2023 Book Award, and the National Communication Association’s 2023 GLBTQ Communication Studies Division Book Award.

Currently, their work centers queer and disability environmental futures. Cram is producing a podcast to write their second book, Disability Ecologies of Care and Memory, which details the rhetorical life of the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm within disability cultural memory. The project focuses on intersections of disability history, historic preservation/restoration, and food systems communication. This work was recognized with the 2023 Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award by the National Communication Association. In addition, they are collaborating with Prof. Constance Gordon (San Francisco State University) to create the Abundant Ecologies Collaborative.

Cram has published widely on topics ranging from rhetorics of violence, queer/trans geographies, affect, queer archival imaginaries, and witnessing and visual culture. Their essays have appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication, Environmental Communication, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, among others, in addition to Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies (New York University Press, 2016). Dr. Cram is the 2022 recipient of the National Communication Association’s Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division’s Early Career Award in addition to the 2014 recipient of the Stephen Lucas Debut Publication Award from the National Communication Association.