Climate Fiction
I've been studying climate fiction (and other representations of the nonhuman environment) for over fifteen years. My climate fiction 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, with a focus on parenthood and posterity. 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, refracted, for example, through the theories of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Gerard Genette. Funding:
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. Cultural histories I've edited include Climate and Literature and, with Kelly Sultzbach, the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate.
My work is increasingly cross-cultural. With Xianmin Shen, I've edited a special issue of the journal Intertexts on Comparative Critical Perspectives on the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, with Xi Liu and colleagues, I led a project to compare 'Western' and Chinese histories of climate and literature. Presented at the 174th Nobel Symposium on world literature in 2022, this research was published in a volume edited by symposium organisers in 2024. Funding:
See also my contribution to the Climate Action Almanac published by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. |
Climate and Health in Malaysia
As Chair of the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub's Malaysia node from 2023 to 2024, I collaborated with colleagues to investigate communication challenges around climate and health in Malaysia, including co-authoring the first systematic review of the issue and contributing 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); I led a baseline survey for the Academy on Malaysians' behaviours, values, and communication habits around planetary health. Funding:
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Literature and SustainabilityWith 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 GenreI 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. My essays on Porden have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Women's Writing, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. |
The EpicMy second book, The History of the Epic, widened the lens to take in the long history of the epic from Homer to Hollywood.
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