Eliza McCarthy

Thesis Title: Sounding Caribbean Literature

Supervisor: Professor Malachi McIntosh

My doctoral research examines the presentation of nonhuman soundscapes in Caribbean literature. I draw together sound studies and Caribbean studies, problematising the ocular-centric tendencies that consume the environmental humanities, whilst also offering a departure from sound studies' previous denunciation of postcolonial discourse through its focus on the peripheralised sonic experience. The project considers literary renderings of auditory experiences of ecologically and geopolitically shifting environments (such as the jungle, plantation, garden, city, and ocean) in the Caribbean, illuminating previously occluded perceptions of environments throughout the sonorous archipelago. Working across Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone regions of the Caribbean, this project centres on heterogeneous modes of listening and seeks to complicate colonial epistemologies of space that see the senses as distinctly separate modes of understanding. 

Research Interests: environmental humanities, energy humanities, critical ocean studies, sound studies, Caribbean literature, postcolonial ecocriticism, world literature, archive, genre, terraqueous ecologies. 

Publications: 

McCarthy, Eliza. "“A Little Happy Sound”: Collective Labor, Ecocide, and Soundscapes in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland." Studies in the Novel, vol. 56 no. 2, 2024, p. 115-128. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928652.