News and Events
“Ground-shattering poems.”
“Language that both disturbs and delights.”
Caroline Noël’s review of Into the Continent published in The Literary Review of Canada.
Book Launch! (New date)
6:00 pm, 20 May 2024 at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies
IAS Common Ground, G11 South Wing, UCL Bloomsbury Campus, Gower Street, London UK WC1E 6BT
Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada
Ecologies in Practice is an edited collection of dynamic and multi-formatted contributions that explore the ways in which cultural production informs perceptions, communications, and knowledge of environmental distress in a Canadian context, pointing to the significance of the arts in the creation and sharing of crucial counter narratives and alternative possibilities.
About
I am a writer and interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities scholar working at the intersection of arts, politics, and environmental justice. I am particularly concerned with questions related to environmental degradation, extractive industries, biodiversity, land and place, and artistic engagement with these themes.
Using methods such as literary analysis, ethnography and autoethnography, archival research, research creation, and interviews, my work examines multispecies relationships on mining-affected landscapes. I am Assistant Professor of World and Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. My current research, funded by the British Academy, examines the social and environmental damages caused by Guinea’s rapidly expanding bauxite industry and the response of communities, artists, and cultural professionals to these impacts.
Prior to my current position, I have held research fellowships at the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry at UCL, the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. I have also worked as a Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia.
My doctoral research examined the environmental history of apartheid and the response of amaXhosa poets to racial oppression and environmental injustice. My work contends that oral and vernacular language texts should receive greater consideration by postcolonial ecocritics, since the literatures of historically marginalized groups often have the most to say about human relationships with natural environments and experiences of environmental injustice. This research was published in the monograph Of Land, Bones, and Money (University of Virginia Press, 2019), which received Honourable Mention for the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada.
I have received awards for my poetry from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment and have been a finalist for poetry awards from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the League of Canadian Poets, and the Canadian Authors’ Association. My most recent book of poetry, Into the Continent, is newly published by Oskana Poetry & Poetics at University of Regina Press (March 2024).