My research explores the emergence of early notions of the “environment” in Middle English literary, legal, and historiographical discourse. I accomplish this novel philological study by tracing the term erthe, or earth, across texts that narrate imperial failure and crises of human–nonhuman governance. Drawing on the work of contemporary critical and legal Indigenous scholarship, I seek to unite philology and ecocriticism to uncover medieval writers’ approaches to territory, land, and earth(l)y matter. Ultimately, my project aims to bring concepts of territory, the nonhuman, and environmental politics to bear on the present-day Western environmental imaginary, the Anthropocene, and the imperial roots of anthropogenic climate change.

As a UBC Public Scholar, I extend this research into the applied work of speculative futures. I am presently building an interview-based public scholarship resource that combines expert commentary, myth-busting, and neomedieval games. The final, multimedia component of my dissertation will draw on my research findings and public engagement to propose and demo, in videogame form, a playable medieval environment.