Dr. Lauren Cullen is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC, where she also holds affiliations with the Centre for European Studies and Centre for Climate Justice. 

Dr. Cullen’s research is located at the intersection of nineteenth-century literature and culture, animal studies, and the environmental humanities, with interests in the histories of the British empire, settler colonialism, and sustainability. In broad terms, her scholarship explores how literature shapes how we understand and engage with the natural world, especially with nonhuman animal life. She is completing her first monograph, provisionally entitled Animals and the Possibilities of Genre, which places realist-adjacent fiction alongside developing interest in scientific understandings of animal minds and behaviours to demonstrate the complex and nuanced ways sensation fiction, detective fiction, the Canadian realistic wild animal story, and animal autobiography were deeply engaged with questions surrounding relationships with and understandings of animals. She is currently investigating ecological thinking and representations of environmental collapse in early Canadian literature.

Dr. Cullen holds a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford, where she was also a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow, as well as an M.A. and B.A. from Queen’s University, Canada.

Research Areas:
Environmental Humanities
Science And Technology Studies

Period/Nation Research Area:
Romantic, Victorian and Nineteenth-Century Literatures

Select Publications

• “‘Almost as a Person Would’: The Thinking Animal in Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1893).” Victorian Literature and Culture 53, no 1 (Spring 2025), 112-139.
• “Animal-Human Entanglements in the Wild Animal Stories of Charles G.D. Roberts.” Beastly Modernisms: Animal Figurations in Modernist Literature and Culture. Alex Goody and Saskia McCracken, Eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2023), 181-197.
• Review of The Friend by Sigrid Nunez: “You Can’t Explain Death to a Dog: Interspecies Grief and Companionship.” Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies. 29. 1 (March 2021), 109-112. Solicited.
• Review of “Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey” by Christie Harner. Journal of Literature and Science. 13. 2 (December 2020), 577-579.