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Axel Goodbody

Prof. Dr. Axel Goodbody

Carson Fellow

Professor Axel Goodbody is a leading authority on German environmental literature. He has written and edited books, and has also organized conferences on literary and filmic representations of nature and the environment since the Romantic Period, ecocritical theory, and other aspects of twentieth-century German literature, including cultural memory, exile studies, and GDR studies. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin where he was a Foundation Scholar, and spent ten years teaching and completing an MA and PhD at the University of Kiel in Germany, before moving to the University of Bath, where he teaches German and European culture and history and German language. He was co-founder of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (EASLCE) in 2004. He leads the departmental research group "Memory, History and Identity," is associate editor of "ECOZON@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment," and is co-editing the book series "Nature, Culture and Literature" (Rodopi) and "New Studies in European Cinema" (Lang). He is currently working on Energy Narratives as part of the 3-year AHRC-funded project "Stories of Change: Energy in the Past, Present and Future," and is also writing on climate skepticism in Germany for a co-authored comparative study of climate change debates in the USA, Britain, and Germany.

 RCC Research Project: Climate Skepticism: Cultures and Subjectivities

Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Climate Scepticism: Cultures and Subjectivities 


Selected Publications:

  • "German Ecocriticism: An Overview." In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 547–59. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • "Risk, Denial, and Narrative Form in Climate Change Fiction: Barbara Kingsolver's 'Flight Behaviour' and Ilija Trojanow's 'Melting Ice.'" In The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner, 39–58. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2014.
  • "Heimat and the Place of Humans in the World: Jenny Erpenbeck’s 'Heimsuchung' in Ecocritical Perspective." New German Critique 41 (forthcoming).
  • The Self in Ttransition : East German Autobiographical Writing Before and After Unification (Essays in Honour of Dennis Tate). Amsterdam, Holland: Rodopi. (co-edited with David Clarke)