海角社区

Associate Professor

Email:

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FAB 5.15
University of 海角社区
Coventry CV4 7EQ
United Kingdom

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About

Trained in American literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on poetry and poetics, I work primarily on environmental approaches to world-literary studies; global modernism; Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory; and debates around the Anthropocene, degrowth and postcapitalist futures.

I currently act as Co-Lead for the university's Sustainability Spotlight InitiativeLink opens in a new window, and convene the MA in Environmental Humanities.

Research interests

Principal interests include the project of theorising world literature in relation to the history of capitalism, and situating the emergence of global modernism within the context of uneven and combined development. The former is the focus of a forthcoming monograph that aims to assess how world-literary studies might respond to the challenges, and opportunities, posed by the advent of the Anthropocene. Additional interests in the aesthetics of ecology and labour in American literary history; eco-Marxism; critical theory, with a focus on the early Frankfurt School; and debates around degrowth. These interests are reflected in three current studies: Sacrifice Zones: Neoliberal Culture and the Limits to Capitalist Nature, on the co-production of weird nature and weird culture in contemporary literary responses to capitalist crisis; Collaborations with Nature, an examination of the ecological roots of Frankfurt School critical theory; and Degrowth Imaginaries, a preliminary survey of cultural prefigurations of a world order beyond the present regime of open-ended capitalist accumulation, extractivism and ecocide.

Teaching and supervision

I teach on the BA/MA programmes in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. In addition to those listed above right, I lecture on the following modules:

• Modes of Reading
• Literature in Theory
• History and Textuality

My postgraduate research supervisions include the following:

• Elizabeth Smith (PhD, expected 2025), The 鈥淓nvironmental Uncanny鈥�: Unsettling the Multispecies Encounter in Contemporary Environmental Poetry (co-supervised with Jonathan Skinner)
• Martin Platais (PhD, expected 2027), On the Natural History of Catastrophe: Crisis, Form, and Temporality in Luk谩cs鈥檚 Concept of Reification and His Theories of the Novel
• Paul Vernell (PhD, expected 2027), The Poetics of Combined and Uneven Development:
  Chronotopic Forms in World-Poetry
• Sam Weselowski (PhD, 2024), Metropolitan Frontiers: Vancouver Poetry and the Urban Form of Extraction, 1965-2018 (co-supervised with Myka Tucker-Abramson and Jonathan Skinner)
• Demet Intepe (PhD, 2020), Environmental Justice and Writers as Activists in Multi-Ethnic North American Literatures, Film, and Theater (co-supervised with Pablo Mukherjee)
• Martin Schauss (PhD, 2019), Like a Thing Forsaken: Beckett, Sebald and the Politics of Materiality (co-supervised with Daniel Katz)
• Justin Neville Kaushall (PhD, 2018), The Historical Negation of Aesthetic Categories: Adorno鈥檚 Inheritance of Kant鈥檚 Critique of Judgment (co-supervised with Diarmuid Costello)
• George Ttoouli (PhD, 2017), Twentieth Century US Ecopoetics and Serial Poetic Form
• Nesrin Degirmencioglu (PhD, 2013), Uneven Cities: The Dialectic of Urban Modernity and Literary Form in Dos Passos, Tanp谋nar, Auster and Pamuk (co-supervised with Maureen Freely)
• William Clarke (PhD, 2009), Perturbed Realism: The Social Novel and Fictitious Capital (co-supervised with Neil Lazarus)

I welcome supervisions in the areas listed under my research interests, above.

Recent publications

• World Literature in the Anthropocene (Palgrave, forthcoming)
• Co-author, with the 海角社区 Research Collective, "Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century," MLQ: A Journal of Literary History 84.4 (December 2020): 465-489.
• "Post-Capitalist Futures: A Report on Imagination." Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction, ed. Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion and Andrew Milner (Palgrave, 2020).
• "Everyday Dissent: Colonised Lifeworlds in Twentieth Century Poetry." World Literature and Dissent, ed. Lorna Burns and Katie Muth (Routledge, 2019).
• Co-author, with the 海角社区 Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP, 2015).

Recent talks

• 鈥溾�楢n Apocalyptic sun explodes鈥�: Etel Adnan's Arab Apocalypse.鈥� Modernist Precarities, Paris, June 2024.

• 鈥淭he Death of Energy.鈥� Cultures of Energy Transitions, Dublin, May 2024.

• 鈥淭he Exceptional Worker in the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination.鈥� Labour in the Long Nineteenth Century, Southampton, January 2024.

• 鈥淩evolution within the Revolution: Anticolonial Environmentalisms in the Long 1960s.鈥� Historical Materialism: Countering the Plague, November 2023.

• 鈥淪econd Nature: The Soundscape of Modernity in Dialectic of Enlightenment.鈥� International Conference on Critical Theory, Loyola University in Rome, May 2022.

• 鈥淐ruel Fictions: Borders as Sacrifice Zones in the Anthropocene.鈥� Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, June 2021.

Professional associations

Teaching

Undergraduate modules

EN2C8/3C8 Explorations in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies

Postgraduate modules

EN9ZE Critical Environments