Gatlin’s research examines intersections of literature, visual culture, and environmentalism. Her book in progress, Reading Toxicity: Hierarchical Hazard, Audience Disturbance, and Narrative Form in American Literature, traces a history of narratives of pollution and toxicity from the nineteenth century to the present, examining the ways that writers disturb conventional empathic and identificatory reading practices to promote social action and environmental justice. Her publications include:

“Toxic Sublimity and the Crisis of Human Perception: Rethinking Aesthetic, Documentary, and Political Appeals in Contemporary Wasteland Photography.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22.4 (2015): 717–741.

“Disturbing Aesthetics: Industrial Pollution, Moral Discourse, and Narrative Form in Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 68.2 (2013): 201–233. 

“The Potential and Limitations of Interactivity in Gary Snyder’s Urban Literary Ecology.” Toward a Literary Ecology: Places and Spaces in American Literature. Ed. Karen Waldron and Rob Friedman. Scarecrow/Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 3–19.

“‘Los campos extraños de esta ciudad’/‘The strange fields of this city’: Urban Bioregionalist Identity and Environmental Justice in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s ‘Freeway 280.’” The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty, Tom Lynch, and Karla Armbruster. University of Georgia Press, 2012. 245–262.

“An Epistemology of the Everyday: Occupational Health and Environmental Justice in Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest.” Literature and Medicine 27.2 (2008): 153–175.

“‘Experience is all we have’: Postpositivist Realist Ethics in Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.” A Wilderness of Signs: Ethics, Beauty, and Environment after Postmodernism. Ed. Joseph Jordan. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2006. 173–188.