How can we understand climate change, food crises, plastic pollution, or GMOs? And what ought we to do about these crises? Engaging with these necessarily interdisciplinary questions, my research investigates what humanities scholars in general and literary critics in particular might contribute to environmental debates. Over the last several years, my work has focused on global environmental risk, tracking cultural responses to such crises as nuclear meltdowns, toxic chemicals, genetically modified foods, and climate collapse across a range of texts, from novels, poems, and plays, to websites, films, popular media and high art. More recently, I have turned to more affirmative accounts of environmental change, including permaculture, agroecology, and biodynamics. Though I am trained in American literature, I am especially interested in supervising students invested in literature and environment and ecocultural studies, whatever their geographical focus.
Contemporary Literature; Ecocriticism and Eco-Cultural Studies; Permaculture, Biodynamics, and Agroecology; Technophilia and Technophobia; Risk Theory; Animals and Animality
Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty
- “A Breed Apart? Narrating Innocence and Viciousness in Breed-Specific Legislation (BSL).” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 33 (Spring 2015): 183-205.
- “Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk.” Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk. Ed. Paul Crosthwaite. New York: Routledge, 2011. 15-30.
- “Discomfort Food: Analogy, Biotechnology, and Risk in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation.” Arizona Quarterly 67.4 (Winter 2011): 135-161.
- Edited, with David Carruthers, Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis. Routledge, forthcoming 2017.
- “It’s the End of the Field as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” American Literary History (ALH). Forthcoming.
