Writings on nineteenth century environments​

The Climates of the Victorian Novel: Seasons, Weather, and Regional Fiction in Britain and Australia
PMLA ​(2021)
Winner of the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies (2021), North American Victorian Studies Association

The climatic underpinnings of Victorian literature can be glimpsed through the contrasting forms taken by the regional novel in a canonical British example of the genre and in a less familiar example from Australia.... [T]he Victorian settler empire provides an arena where the nineteenth-century novel can be seen engaging directly with some of the most pressing environmental concerns and compromises of our own moment.

Ecological Formalism, or, Love in the Ruins [​with Nathan K. Hensley]
Introduction to Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, ed. Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer (Fordham University Press, 2019)

​Ecological Form is about how we might think about the nineteenth century—about how we need to do so—as we come to terms with a damaged and seemingly diminished present. What can the Age of Coal tell us about the Age of Man? ... And in what ways does the legacy of extractive imperialism in the nineteenth century continue to shape experience now?

Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal [with Nathan K. Hensley]
In Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, ed. Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer (Fordham University Press, 2019)

This chapter revises existing accounts of Victorian mediation by locating what is arguably the signal cultural form of the nineteenth century—the novel—within the global energy system that increasingly made it possible.... Our aim in this deliberately constrained experiment in reading for coal is to offer a test case in adducing how the practices and infrastructures of fossil combustion became legible as literary effect.

Writings on empire, culture, and political economy

On Systematic Colonization and the Culture of Settler Colonialism: Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney (1829)
BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.

In its wide-reaching political and cultural impacts, Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney constitutes the entry point to what might be called, after Lauren Goodlad, a Victorian settler-colonial “geopolitical unconscious.” A Letter from Sydney and the project of systematic colonization illuminates the deep urge of the Victorians to remake the world in their own image, as well as the global exchanges and imaginaries that helped shape the culture of metropolitan Britain.

Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism
Victorian Studies (2016)

Operating alongside and in conjunction with vast movements of the population and transfers of capital, Greater Britain’s textual dimension is characterized by the formal complexities that arise from the clash of metropolitan and colonial concerns across discontinuous imperial spaces.

The Romance of Uneven Development: Geography, Capitalism, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Globalized Pacific
Victorian Literature and Culture (2015)

These novels represent a concerted attempt to describe the workings of an emerging form of imperial expansion driven more by multinational forms of financial speculation than national political interests.

Writings on twentieth century New Zealand

The Culture of Erosion: Settler Colonialism, Geological Agency, and New Zealand Literature, 1930s–1950s
Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Yet what emerges from the archive of mid-twentieth century settler writing in New Zealand is a strikingly literal, visible sense of the Anthropocene. This is because the geological agency of settlement was plainly evident in the nation’s eroding hillsides and flooding rivers. ... However, writers such as Bethell and Guthrie-Smith demonstrate that it was possible to think outside such terms. They drew on different aesthetic and cultural perspectives to offer a more radical questioning of the choices and values that created and sustained the culture of erosion.

Colonial Ecologies: Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira and Writing the Settled Environment
A History of New Zealand Literature, ed. Mark Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

[D]riven by the economic imperatives of the forestry industry as well as by the expansion of pastoral production, its environmental history until the mid-twentieth century is one of widespread destruction and radical transformation. It was on this violently modified and ever more industrialised terrain that New Zealand literature took its increasingly distinctive shape.