Hanna E. Morris

Dr. Hanna E. Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto with expertise in climate change media and critical methods of cultural analysis. Her research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores questions of power, identity-formation, and meaning-making around climate change. She is the Co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network (CSSN), an Associate Deputy Editor at Climatic Change, and the Co-chair of the Environment, Science, and Risk Communication Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).   

Her newest book is titled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2025). The book reveals how national anxieties following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 have shaped American journalistic and political interpretations of climate change in ways that severely limit how it has come to be known, imagined, and contended with. Looking at climate change reporting across prominent and ideologically diverse U.S. news publications over the past decade, the book traces how news media create an illusion of control in the present through nostalgic and heroic stories of the past. Morris identifies a new mode of reactionary politics called “apocalyptic authoritarianism” to describe the post-2016 alignment of historically privileged figures united by a common enemy of the “new” New Left and a shared appeal to fears of “total crisis.” This antidemocratic paradigm portends national and planetary disarray if progressive social and climate justice “warriors” are not controlled at home and if “unruly masses” of climate migrants are not contained abroad. In addition to contending with the implications of apocalyptic authoritarianism, Morris also calls for more robust forms of climate journalism and politics capable of facilitating—not impeding—radically democratic responses to climate change.    

Her research and writing have been published in various academic journals and popular media outlets including Climatic Change, WIREs Climate Change, Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, Politique Américaine, Places Journal, Reading the Pictures, and Earth Island Journal, among others. She also edited the Special Issue on Backlash, Borders, and Bunkers: Antidemocratic Politics and Climate Change Communication for the journal Environmental Communication (2026) and co-edited the book titled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (Routledge, 2021). Her scholarship has been recognized by the Connaught New Researcher Award, IAMCR Stuart Hall Award, New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences.