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Research Group

Environmental Arts and Humanities

A view across the Colne river beside our Colchester Campus. Photo by @rhysh286 on Instagram.

Addressing the global climate and ecological crises

Environmental arts and humanities at Essex is a group of researchers and educators that apply a range of disciplinary expertise to address the urgent global climate and ecological crisis.

We are committed to working across subject areas to find innovative solutions to immediate and longer-term problems. Our members include world leaders in their fields of study and new generation thinkers.

The distinctive strengths of environmental arts and humanities at Essex are centred on an interdisciplinary approach that brings together theoretical research with applied scholarship and practice-as-research. Projects include creative writing, film, theatre studies, and the curation of art exhibitions as well as historical environmental studies, environmental law, literary geographies and ecologies, and ecocriticism. We look for difficult challenges that require innovative solutions and are committed to using our expertise to confront environmental crises at local, national and global levels.

Our research is impactful at its core, bringing change and transforming how societies around the world confront some of the most serious issues that they have ever faced.

Our research

Group Lead

Academic members

Dr James Canton

Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)

Research interests: Nature writing and the New Nature Writing movement; creative non-fiction; ecocriticism; psychogeography and the rural derive; writing on the Essex landscape; the writers of Essex; British travel writing on Arabia; travel writing and theory; the work of W.G. Sebald; the interface between colonial history and postcolonialism

Professor Peter Gurney

Professor, School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies

Research interests: Consumerism and consumer movements; Popular politics and popular protest; Working-class culture and autobiography

Dr Owen Robinson

Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)

Research interests: Literature and culture of the US South; William Faulkner; New Orleans; Post-war US fiction; African-American literature; Theory Bakhtin, reader-response, literary geography

Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)

Research interests: twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and film; modernism; speculative fiction; utopian studies; queer studies

Reader, School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies

Research interests: Race and Ethnicity in East Asia; Social History of Drugs; Visual History, Southeast and East Asia; Social and Political History of Modern China; History of Public Health and Medicine in 20th century China; Food and Foodways; Global Environmental History; History of Religion in Modern East Asia; Global Public Health

Dr Patricia Gillies

Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)

Research interests: Theoretical approaches to literature and art history; Lacanian theory; narratives and apocalyptic figuration in Medieval beast literature; gender/genre implications; narrative construction in Old French epic and Medieval and Renaissance analogues; Troubadour poetry and parallels in narrative design of other genres; literary tradition and Thomas Hobbes Historia Ecclesiastica; issues in modernism; expression and configuration of light in the works of Stephane Mallarmé; Old Icelandic literature; the theory and practice of literary translation; Gaudier-Brzeska Archive; Gaudier-Brzeska Archive, Albert Sloman Library; Fantasy Literature and Medieval and Modernist contexts; Operas and Literary Context: Wagner; Representing UoE' special collection of Sophie Gaudier- Brzeska; Lecture at University of Warsaw, post-graduates, on Shakespeare's tragedies

Professor Karen Hulme

Professor, Essex Law School

Research interests: Laws of armed conflict; Environmental law; Human rights and the environment

Dr Stephen Turner

Senior Lecturer, Essex Law School

Research interests: Global Environmental Governance; Human Rights and the Environment; International Environmental Law; Corporate Responsibility; International Trade / Investment and the Environment; Climate Change Law; Banking / Finance / Insurance and the Environment; Constitutional Environmental Rights

The lakes at Wivenhoe Park

Susan Oliver Cluser Lead

Email: soliver@essex.ac.uk

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