E Cram is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Their expertise includes queer ecologies, queer theory, settler colonialisms, environmental cultural studies, rhetorical criticism and publicly engaged collaborative scholarship. They are an Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies & Communication.  

In their first book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, Energy and the Making of the North American West (University of California Press, 2022), Cram examines sexuality as a discernible force in environmental transformation. Re-reading archives of and public encounters with sites of settler colonialism and state violence throughout the North American West, Cram traces networks of capacity building that enabled both the production of bodily vitality and the exhaustion of racialized populations. Written for scholars in queer studies and the environmental/energy humanities, this book offers a grounded account of the importance of racialized sexualities in understanding the legacies of violence in making environments and energy cultures.

Current projects include a book length project analyzing how dominant views of the environment intersected with sexuality, disability, and land use in the landscapes of 19th and 20th century state medical institutions. The project traces how public collaboration has transformed one of those sites through food access programs and collaborative practices of disability justice, in order to show the vital necessity of disability in contemporary conversations about environmental futures. Additional future projects include The Abundant Ecologies Collaborative with Prof. Constance Gordon (San Francisco State University), a digital humanities project that traces vernaculars of abundance across multiple spheres of environmental organizing. 

Cram’s essays have appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication, among others, in addition to Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies (New York University Press, 2016). Dr. Cram is the 2014 recipient of the Stephen Lucas Debut Publication Award from the National Communication Association.