Postdoctoral Fellows

Derek Gladwin

Photo of Derek Gladwin.
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow

Ph.D., University of Alberta

Website: www.derekgladwin.com

Biography

I completed my PhD in English and Film Studies at University of Alberta in 2014, where I held the Vanier Canada Scholarship and was awarded a Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal of Canada. I have served as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of British Columbia, as well as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Moore Institute at National University of Ireland, Galway (2015), the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (in the Environmental Humanities) at the University of Edinburgh (2015), the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montréal (2016), and the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Trinity College Dublin (2017).

My interdisciplinary research and teaching broadly explore transformations in environment and society through 20th-/21st-Century British and Irish literature, as well as film and media culture. This work is situated in the environmental and energy humanities, examining issues related to contested territory, literary cartography, spatial injustices, narratives of fear about energy futures, and cultural approaches to climate change — as they all relate to the United Kingdom, Ireland, the North Atlantic, and in some global culture.

Selected Publications

Books

Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture (ed.). Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press (forthcoming 2018).

Ecological Exile: Spatial Injustice and Environmental Humanities. London: Routledge (forthcoming Jan. 2018).

Contentious Terrains: Boglands, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic. Cork, IRL: Cork University Press, 2016.

Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture, and Environment (co-edited with Christine Cusick). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (co-edited with Robert Brazeau). Cork, IRL: Cork University Press, 2014.

Articles and Chapters

“Ecocriticism.” Oxford Bibliographies in “Literary and Critical Theory.” Ed. Eugene O’Brien. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

“The Literary Cartographic Impulse: Imaginative Island Topographies in Ireland and Newfoundland.” Text and Beyond Text: New Visual, Material, and Spatial Perspectives in Irish Studies. Spec. issue of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 38.1-2 (2014): 158-183.

“Ecocritical and Geocritical Conjunctions in North Atlantic Environmental Multimedia and Place-Based Poetry.” Eds. Robert T. Tally Jr. and Christine Battista. Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 37-54.

“Joyce the Travel Writer: Space, Place, and the Environment in James Joyce’s Nonfiction.” Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce. Eds. Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin. Cork, IRL: Cork University Press, 2014. 176-194.

“The Bog Gothic: Bram Stoker’s ‘Carpet of Death’ and Ireland’s Horrible Beauty.” EcoGothic. Spec. issue of Gothic Studies 16.1 (2014): 39-54.

“Thirdspace in Willie Doherty’s Photo-text Diptychs of Northern Ireland.” Visual Culture in Britain 15.1 (2014): 1-19.

“No Country for Young Men: Chinese Modernity, Displacement, and Initiatory Ritual in Chinese Sixth Generation Cinema.” Asian Cinema 23.1 (2012): 31-44.

“Gendered Troubles on Screen: Reproducing Nationalism in Mike Leigh’s Four Days in July.” Devised and Directed by Mike Leigh. Eds. Marc DiPaolo and Bryan Cardinale-Powell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 251-275.

Fellowships & Awards

  • Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-19)
  • Killam Postdoctoral Fellow Research Prize, University of British Columbia (2016)
  • James M. Flaherty Research Award, Ireland-Canada University Foundation (2016)
  • SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015-17)
  • Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal (2014)
  • Andrew Stewart Prize, University of Alberta (2013)
  • Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2011-2014)

Current Research

My Banting Postdoctoral research project entitled Petro-Gothic: Energy, Ecology, Fear explores energy transitions by marking the ways in which creative responses are narrated through fear and then circulated in forms of contemporary literature and media. Energy is not only geophysical and economic, but it is also social and cultural in the ways it conceptually and practically influences our lives. As a cultural response to energy, I explore how literature and media have produced “petro-gothic” narratives. These narratives about energy transitions and futures inform society and, in some cases, mobilize change by transforming social values and perceptions through image and story. This research examines fear as it relates to energy subjectivity, offshore oil sublime, ecophobia, and post-oil landscapes in some works by Bansky, Laura Watts, George Mackay Brown, Greenpeace International, and China Miéville, among others.