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Research Group

Environmental Arts and Humanities

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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

Ecocriticism, Green Writing and Literary Geographies
Human Rights and the Environment

Group Lead

Professor Susan Oliver

Professor Susan Oliver

Project Lead

Department of Literature, FIlm, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex

Susan joined Essex in 2010, taking up her role as Faculty Dean Research (Humanities) in July 2019.

Academic members

Professor Susan Oliver
Professor, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Research interests: Romanticism and Romantic period literature and culture; Scottish literature; Late 18th Century British and American literature; 19th century British and American literature; Periodicals and magazines; Transatlantic studies; Ecocriticism; Borders and cultural encounters; Environmental literature; Romanticism; Walter Scott; Charles Lamb studies
Dr Lisa Blackmore
Senior Lecturer, School of Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies
Research interests: Modernity in Latin America; Visual culture; Space and politics; Memory politics; Human-nature relations; Water, hydraulics, liquid ecologies in the arts; Environmental aesthetics; Photography; Digital culture; Contemporary visual production in Latin America; VENEZUELA RESEARCH NETWORK. With Dr. Penélope Plaza (University of Reading), Dr. Rebecca Jarman (University of Leeds).
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
Dr Marie Guillot
Senior Lecturer, School of Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies
Research interests: Philosophy of mind; philosophy of language; epistemology; philosophy of psychology; Speech acts
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
Dr Sean Seeger
Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Dr Xun Zhou
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
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
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