Climate Fiction

I've been studying climate fiction (and other representations of the nonhuman environment) for over fifteen years. My research has been published in journals such as Studies in the Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, and English Studies; in two highly cited review articles in WIREs Climate Change in 2011 and 2017, and in my 2019 monograph Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel. In 2018, I edited Cli-Fi: A Companion, with Axel Goodbody, for general readers, teachers, and students.

More recent essays have dealt with literary realism in the Anthropocene, through the theories of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Gerard Genette.

Funding: 

• Co-investigator on From Climate to Landscape: Imagining the Future, 2009-12, European Social Fund (£600,110)
• Co-investigator on "How Like a Leaf": Nature, Art, and World, 2018-20, Arts and Humanities Research Council - Technē Doctoral Training Partnership (£9,600)
• Co-investigator on Understanding Landscape through Creative Auto-Ethnographies, 2007, Arts and Humanities Research Council Networks and Workshops Grant (£12,400)

See also my articles on climate fiction in The Conversation here and here.

Cultural Histories of Climate

Cultural histories of climate help us understand how we've arrived at the contemporary climate crisis and the wider Anthropocene. I've edited cultural histories such as Climate and Literature and, with Kelly Sultzbach, the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate. 

My work is increasingly cross-cultural. With Xianmin Shen, I edited a special issue of the Intertexts on Comparative Critical Perspectives on the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, with colleagues as XJTLU, I led a project to compare 'Western' and Chinese histories of climate and literature. I presented this research at the 174th Nobel Symposium on world literature in 2022, and we published it in 2024.

Funding:

• Lead investigator on The History of Climate and Literature: A Comparison of Chinese and Western Texts, 2021-23, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Research Development Fund (¥96,750)

See also my contribution to the Climate Action Almanac published by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination (also available as Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures)

Climate and Health in Malaysia

With colleagues at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub's Malaysia node, which I chaired from 2023 to 2024, I investigated communication challenges around climate and health in Malaysia; we authored the first systematic review of the issue and I contributed to a successful funding bid for an Asian research hub for climate and health. 

I was also a member of the Communication, Cultural Values, and Behavioural Shift working group for Malaysia's National Planetary Health Action Plan, coordinated by Akademi Sains Malaysia (Malaysian Academy of Sciences) and worked with Monash colleagues on a baseline survey for the Academy on Malaysians' behaviours, values, and communication habits around planetary health.

Funding:

• Co-investigator (now consultant) on REACH: Regional Asia Hub for Climate Change and Health, 2024-27, IDRC Canada and FCDO United Kingdom

Literature and Sustainability

With the late John Parham and Louise Squire, I edited one of the first books on Literature and Sustainability for Manchester University Press in 2017. This volume is open access and was also reissued in paperback in 2024.

Romanticism, Gender, and Genre

I began my career in British Romanticism, looking at the epic in the Romantic period and the strategies adopted by women poets to write this conventionally masculine form. My doctoral research and first monograph focused on these questions.

This has led to my research on the poet Eleanor Anne Porden (1795-1825), whose poetry is situated at the intersection of literature, science (including climate), history, and gender. I am currently completing a monograph on Porden's life and work and have published essays on Porden in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Women's Writing, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 

The Epic