I joined UCC in 2023 as Lecturer in Literature and the Environment in the School of English & Digital Humanities, where I am also a founding member of the Radical Humanities Laboratory. As a literary scholar, my work is broadly focused on the entangled social and ecological dimensions of species loss and revival in contemporary settler colonial literatures and digital media/arts. My scholarship in the growing field of Extinction Studies was inspired by a paleo-dig I undertook at the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre, which is located on Treaty 1 territory, the home of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. During this paleodig, I unearthed the bones of an 80 million year old mosasaur (known as the ‘T-Rex of the Sea’), and became fascinated with the cross-pollination of the arts and sciences in the creative representation of extinct species. This interest in extinction continues in my book project on species revivalist representations of extinct species like the dodo, woolly mammoth, and thylacine. In addition, I am at work on another book (under advance contract with Reaktion) that explores the “next natures” of the biotechnologically revived woolly mammoth (or “mammophant”). These projects follow on from my first scholarly monograph, Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture (under advance contract with Manchester University Press). In this book, I examine how twentieth and twenty-first century authors and artists reimagine Darwin's thinking on decompositional processes through the necro-ecological agency of earthworms, snails, corals, fish, and fungi. My research on these projects combines approaches to animal studies, science and technology studies (STS), ecofeminism, extinction studies, and Darwinist/evolutionary literary studies. I warmly welcome proposals from prospective postgraduate researc

My main research interests include literary and aesthetic representations of species loss and revival, critical approaches to nature and death (or what I term 'necro-ecology'), and the material cultures of species afterlives.

Environmental Humanities Animal Studies Neo-Victorian & Contemporary Literature Cultural Studies Posthumanism Science and Technology Studies Ecofeminism Extinction Studies Settler Colonial Studies Postcolonial Ecocriticism Queer Ecology