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. My current research is funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship based in the School of European Languages, Culture, and Society / Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry at University College London. I examine 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. I also teach ecocritical courses in the School’s BA and MA Comparative Literature programs.
Prior to my current position, I held a research fellowship at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana and a Sessional Lectureship in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, where I taught graduate and undergraduate courses in sustainability, composition, and environmental literature. I have also held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and from York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies (now the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change).
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).