Sarah Bezan researches contemporary environmental literature and visual art that engages with evolution and extinction. Her first book, Dead Darwin: Evolutionary Decompositions in Neo-Victorian Culture (forthcoming with Manchester University Press, 2021) examines how twentieth and twenty-first century authors and artists reimagine Darwin's thinking on decompositional processes through the necro-ecological agency of earthworms, corals, fish, snails, and fungi. She is also at work on a second monograph on species revivalist representations of the woolly mammoth, dodo, great auk, thylacine, Steller's sea cow, and Pinta island tortoise. From January 2018–January 2020, Sarah held a British Academy-funded Newton International Fellowship at The University of Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre, and has recently become a founding member of the UK Future Earth Early Career Researchers & Practitioners Network based at King's College, London. Further information on publications and research activities can be found at sarahbezan.com.
RCC Research Project: Extinction Imaginaries: Species Loss and Revival in a Biotechnological Age
Selected Publications:
- "Dodo Birds and the Anthropogenic Wonderlands of Harri Kallio." Parallax 27 (2020): forthcoming.
- "Regenesis Aesthetics: Visualizing the Woolly Mammoth in De-Extinction Science." Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 45 (2019): 218-237.
- "The Endling Taxidermy of Lonesome George: Iconographies of Extinction at the End of the Line." Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 27, no. 2 (2019): 211-238 (co-edited with Susan McHugh).
- "Necro-Eco: The Ecology of Death in Jim Crace's Being Dead." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 8, no. 3 (2015): 191-207.
- Edited with James Tink. Seeing Animals After Derrida. Lanham: Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield Imprint), 2018 (Ecocritical Theory and Practice series).
- "A Darwinism of the Muck and Mire: Decomposing Eco- and Zoopoetics in Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott's decomp." In Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics, edited by Roland Borgards, Catrin Gersdof, Frederike Middelhoff, and Sebastian Schönbeck. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2019 (Cultural Animal Studies series).