Professor Gerhardt is author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (University of California Press, 2023), which the New Scientist called one of the "best popular science books of 2023" and the LA Times called "a work of art." Sea Change was a California Book Award Silver Medal winner for Contribution to Publishing and a Nautilus Award Silver Medal winner in the category Ecology and Environment. She is a regular commentator on radio and has been featured on the BBC's World Service, CBC's The Current and NPR's 1A, among other radio programs and podcasts.
She is also Editor-in-Chief of ISLE:Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the quarterly journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), published by Oxford University Press. Gerhardt has written about walking and experiential learning, civic engagement and citizen science; about human-animal-environment entanglement; about petro-cultures and petro-landscapes, e.g. plastic and the Pacific; about sea level rise and islands; and about future shorelines. She also uses site specific public art installations to foster civic engagement. She has led walking tours, with both classes and the public, revealing the past histories of urban landscapes, considering how the present-day environment came to be shaped, and imagining possible futures.
Gerhardt has published on critical theory and on Theodor W. Adorno. Her writings examine the concept of nature and of animals in the writings of the Frankfurt School's first generation. She has published articles on Adorno and nature; on nature in Adorno and Kracauer; on animals and compassion in the writings of Adorno, Horkheimer and Schopenhauer; and on animals in Adorno, Cixous, Derrida and Levinas.
Environmental Humanities - Recent Articles and Book Chapters
"Climate Change, the Caribbean and Literature" in Teaching the Literature of Climate Change. Edited by Debby Rosenthal. MLA Series: Options for Teaching, 2024.
"Postcolonial Cartographies, Environmental Humanities and Sea Level Rise" in Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Edited by Cajetan Iheka. MLA Series: Options for Teaching, 2021. pp. 119–128.
Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel. "Introduction: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968." in Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968. Co-Edited by Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel. Camden House, 2019. pp. 1–23.
Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi. "Looking Back: Global Cinema and the Legacy of New Waves around 1968." in 1968 and Global Cinema. Co-Edited by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi. Wayne State University Press, 2018. pp. 1–20.
Gerhardt, Christina (2017). "1968 and the Early Cinema of the dffb". The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. 10 (1): 1–19. doi:10.1080/17541328.2017.1326731.