Ann Goodman, AB’72, AM’73, PhD’81, and Anne Stephenson, AM’01, PhD’07, took skills honed through the study of the humanities and applied them to promote sustainability in the business community and through energy-efficiency technologies.

Ann Goodman, AB’72, AM’73, PhD’81: Author and educator

Goodman initially set out on a path familiar to many humanities graduates by teaching, even before completing her PhD in Linguistics and Comparative Literature. While researching her dissertation in Paris, she began giving classes in American studies at what is now the Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, a university with strong economics and business programs.

She returned to the United States several years later with the intention of embarking on a career in journalism and applied to write for a broad range of publications. When the editor of Fortune wanted her to explain her interest in the magazine, Goodman says her association with economics faculty and students at Dauphine came in handy. She landed a position with the magazine and went on to build a portfolio of reporting for several business and finance publications, including Business Week (now Bloomberg Businessweek) and the NPR radio program Marketplace.

As she conducted interviews, she found that she kept encountering people who were interested in climate change. One interview took place with a Wall Street investor who wanted to create a carbon market. “I was extremely fortunate to learn about this whole field through journalism,” she says. “I essentially got private tutorials with all the most important people in the field.” Fascinated, she began to cultivate a beat dedicated to climate, business, and finance.

As her work drew her more deeply into those issues, she also began to hear from more and more business leaders—particularly women—that they were concerned about how their work intersected with the problem of climate change.

Goodman says she came up with the idea of starting a nonprofit where businesswomen could exchange ideas about sustainability: the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future, which she and several woman executives cofounded in 1999. Goodman secured initial funding from an investor she knew from her journalism work and went on to serve as the organization’s executive director for its first 10 years.

Ultimately, her conversations with business leaders also resulted in a book that challenges the idea that businesspeople don’t care about the environment. Since publishing Adapting to Change: The Business of Climate Resilience (Business Expert, 2016), Goodman has taken a proactive approach to the issue through speaking engagements and by teaching up-and-coming business and finance leaders about how becoming attuned to climate change is smart business strategy—an idea that has been gaining traction for some time.

Goodman welcomes this change. She remembers that when she first joined the Society of Environmental Journalists and ran for a spot on its board, a friendly colleague said to her, “I’m glad you got elected. But why is a business journalist interested in the environment?” She laughs. “Now the question would be, ‘Why is a business journalist not interested?’”

Surveying changes like these in conversations about business and sustainability in the last several decades, she emphasizes that to address the climate crisis will “take everybody, from all points of view, and people in the humanities are very good at communicating.

Anne Stephenson, AM’01, PhD’07: Assistant deputy director of operations, Efficiency Maine Trust

As she made her way into sustainability work, Stephenson was grounded by her interest in the built environment and the spatial intelligence she honed through her studies in art and architectural history.

While writing her dissertation about the preservation of historic residential architecture in Chicago, she became “interested in the larger built environment of Hyde Park.” She was an active member in the Hyde Park Historical Society, and one of the highlights of her graduate school experience was teaching a class she designed on the history of 55th Street. “We followed decades of development just on that street through different buildings,” she recalls.

But as she worked her way toward completing her PhD in Art History, she knew an academic career was not for her. Instead, she says, “I started doing some campus sustainability work while I was finishing my degree at UChicago. The University was just beginning to think about what sustainability meant to them,” and the job pointed in an interesting new direction. She recounts her trajectory over the next few years: “I left Chicago and went to work in a nonprofit that did campus sustainability work, and then from there, I went on to work on some specific campuses, on energy management and sustainability work. I also began to teach energy auditing and weatherization as community colleges began to offer those sorts of things.”

Today, Stephenson works as the assistant deputy director of operations for Efficiency Maine Trust, an agency that supports energy efficiency programs in the state. In addition to the teaching experience she garnered as a graduate student, her humanities training has proved useful.

“My boss tells me I’m a very good noticer,” she says, explaining that the keen visual sense and observational abilities developed while training in Art History have served her well when looking not only at the built environment but also at how that environment shapes interpersonal dynamics, including “how you set up the conference room and how you read the dynamics in a meeting.”

Her orientation to observation and detail also applies well to written work at Efficiency Maine Trust, where she has written and edited annual reports and triennial plans as well as reports on historic preservation and energy efficiency. “I’m involved in every big report that my office does because I have core document production skills from when I had to format my dissertation.”

In her current workplace, Stephenson loves that there are many people who found their way into their work without the on-ramps available to younger people who now train for careers in sustainability—at UChicago’s new multidisciplinary Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, for instance. “For most of my colleagues,” she says, “they came to this from something else, and they want to do it. Everyone has a passion for energy efficiency.”

She shares their enthusiasm. “Energy efficiency is amazing. You are helping people save money, and you’re making their houses more comfortable or their businesses more profitable.”

She urges all readers to look into energy efficiency incentives where they live. Asked how she would advise Humanities students considering how to contribute to sustainability efforts in their careers, she says, “We welcome new graduates into the field. There is work to do!”