Motivation

My research is engaged with how fiction articulates the materiality of bodies of water – how we are interconnected by and through water and the politics of meaning that run through that same materiality. I am consequently interested in how texts might convey the changing nature of our relationship to the oceans in a time of climate crises – and to the nonhuman world more broadly.

Noticing that many of my postgraduate and early career colleagues across the university were working on Anthropocene research, I was keen to join the Anthropocene Research Group to help promote it as a cross-disciplinary space where scholars from all levels could meet to discuss their research and drive change within the institution and beyond.

INTERESTS/RESEARCH

I analyse contemporary fictions from an area I have identified as the Northern Atlantic Littoral – rural and coastal spaces in Eastern Canada and the U.K. – suggesting that fictions from these spaces are reconfiguring the oceanic imaginary of the Northern Atlantic Ocean in ways that remain conscious of how history and politics are sedimented in its material properties and abstract representations. I theorise ‘uncanny water’ as a figuration within these texts, positing that as writers from these spaces evoke or inhibit the uncanny in relation to water and the ocean, they emphasise the unfolding entanglement between bodies of water in ways that emphasise uncertainty, thereby displacing the discourses of mastery and control that have hitherto defined representations of the Northern Atlantic Ocean.