Thesis Title: Cultures of cultivation in Australasia, southern Africa & the Caribbean: literary interventions into colonial and postcolonial agriculture & gardening
Supervisor: Professor Elleke Boehmer, Professor Pablo Mukherjee
Research Interests: Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, ecocriticism, Critical Animal Studies, Australian and New Zealander literatures, postcolonial and world literatures, agricultural and environmental sciences, science communication, creative writing theory and practice.
(Some) Writers of Particular Interest: John Kinsella, Keri Hulme, Alice Oswald, Evelyn Araluen, Alison Whittaker, Randolph Stow, Janet Frame, Carolyn Forché, Ivor Gurney, Ben Lerner, J.M. Coetzee, Kwame Dawes, Arne Næss, Bruno Latour, Val Plumwood, Virginia Woolf, (even) John Keats...
My DPhil project stems from an ongoing interdisciplinary interest in how literatures register and intervene in the diversely destructive ecological paradigms of colonial and postcolonial agricultural systems across the world. I plan, broadly, to investigate how settler-colonial expansion in Australia and Aotearoa influences literary responses to land and sovereignty in very different ways to, say, plantation cultures in the Caribbean (with southern Africa a mixture of these systems and others). In my dissertation for the MSt (World Literatures in English), through analysis of John Kinsella's poetry I began to theorise 'weediness' as a productive critical frame for reading into cultivatory concerns like these. I aim to extend this weedy methodology across geographic and generic lines—from Bessie Head, to Olive Senior, to Alison Whittaker via Coetzee and others.
My poems and reviews have been published in various of Australia's best journals and birthday cards, and I've won poetry prizes in Australia and the UK. Before arriving at Oxford, I was writing poems and exegeses for my creative writing Honours project, while working as an environmental scientist. Writing 80-100,000 words of literary analysis will be a shock to the system, but we'll see how we go!