Settler literature's environmental themes have generally been treated as a backdrop to questions of national identity and belonging, but that body of writing also has the potential to offer unique insights into the human dimensions of environmental change. The aim of this project is to reassess settler poems, novels, and travel narratives as a form of environmental knowledge that allowed colonial society to define the limits of its responsibility to the natural world.

Marsden Fund Standard Grant, 2020-2022 (NZ$657,000)
Marsden Fund Council and Royal Society Te Apārangi

​Co-Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Teresa Shewry (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Associate Investigator: Associate Professor Margaret Forster (Massey University)

​Project website: settlerenvironments.org

Realism, Romance, and the Settler Colonies:
​Literary Form, Imperial Territory and Political Economy, 1829-1915

This project revises our understanding of colonial New Zealand literature, contending that it should be seen as inherently trans-national rather than merely pre-national. Victorian-era writers in New Zealand, Australia and Britain produced a global literature united by the circulation of genres, and I will argue that realism and romance in particular provided them with critical tools for testing the concepts of political economy and territoriality that underpinned this evolving Greater Britain. My research instils New Zealand literature with a new global relevance, positioning the settler colony as key to understanding fundamental aspects of Victorian Britain’s imperial literature and culture.

Marsden Fund Standard Grant, 2012-2015 (NZ$345,000)
Marsden Fund Council and Royal Society Te Apārangi