Professor Ladino’s talk is based on her forthcoming monograph, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (U of Nevada Press, February 2019), which investigates how the physical matter at memorials in the American West influences emotions about historical conflict and national identity. The book brings together various strands of affect theory—from psychology, geography, history, anthropology, and cultural theory—and material ecocritical theory to explore how memorials’ built structures and the natural landscapes that surround them combine with written texts to generate emotion in individual tourists and facilitate the circulation of affect at broader scales. The project pushes environmental humanities scholars to account more carefully for affect, especially in a new epoch—the Anthropocene—marked by newly urgent environmental affects, such as anxiety, grief, solastalgia, and resilience. With its focus on sites managed by the National Park Service (NPS), Memorials Matter draws on Professor Ladino's thirteen seasons as an NPS ranger and extends the research on nostalgia, tourism, and environments that informs her first book, Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (U of Virginia Press, 2012).