About me

Photo credit: Nelly Mao

I am a scholar of English literature, with primary expertise in the relationship between climate and literature. I also have research interests in women's writing of the British Romantic age (1780-1830) and in epic poetry.

I am a Professor in the Department of English at Queen's University, Canada. I am also an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment UK and Ireland (ASLE UKI) from 2011 to 2015.

Born and raised in Malaysia, I gained my BA (Hons) and PhD from Monash University in Australia. I began my academic career at the University of Tampere in Finland; I then went on to positions at the universities of Exeter and Surrey in the UK, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, and Monash University Malaysia. In December 2024, I moved to Canada to take up my current position.

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Current research projects and talks

See my 'Current research' page for information on my forthcoming publications, current projects, and upcoming or very recent talks.

Research supervision

​I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in ecocriticism (especially climate change and literature), British Romantic women poets, or epic literature. 

For a list of my current and past PhD students, see here. 

I also have considerable experience as a PhD examiner, having been external examiner for seventeen PhDs in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Hong Kong.
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My research interests

Climate and literature​

My research into climate and literature includes some of the earliest papers on climate fiction. I've published a monograph on climate fiction and a volume of essays on climate and literature, both with Cambridge University Press. I co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate and am writing The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Climate.
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Romanticism, gender, epic

My Romanticist research deals with issues of gender, genre, and poethood, exploring how women poets engaged with authorial norms.   

Media interviews and recorded talks

Click here for videos of my talks on Youtube, some commentaries and interviews I've given, and my articles in the media.

Publications

Click here for a complete list of my publications.

To view my publications, visit my pages at academia.edu 
or ResearchGate.