I am a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC.

My research is located at the intersection of nineteenth-century literature, animal studies, and the environmental humanities, with broader interests spanning histories of settler colonialism, food studies, and sustainability. My monograph, “Rethinking Character: Animals in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” asks what it means to be a realistic character, and how this might be complicated by our understanding of animals. My book takes up this question by examining the roles of animals in four popular genres: sensation fiction, detective fiction, the realistic wild animal story, and the animal (auto)biography. I am developing a second research project, which makes the case that the damaging effects of human activity — environmental degradation, industrial pollution, and species displacement, among other consequences — underpinned a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian cultural forms, from Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1893) to Emily Carr’s “Stumps and Sky” (1934).

I hold a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where I was also a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow, as well as an MA and BA from Queen’s University, Canada.

Research Areas: Environmental Humanities, Science And Technology Studies and Animal Studies, Romantic, Victorian and Nineteenth-Century Literatures and Canadian Literatures

Select Publications

• “‘Almost as a Person Would’: The Thinking Animal in Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1893).” Victorian Literature and Culture. Forthcoming.
• “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.