Helen Tiffin has degrees in humanities and science from Australia and Canada, and was formerly a professor of English at the Universities of Queensland and Tasmania. She also held a senior Canada Research Chair in English and postcolonial studies at Queen's University, Canada. She is currently a research fellow in animal studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures and literary theory, the representation of animals in scientific and literary works, and environmental history and the preservation of biodiversity. She is currently working on the philosophical and practical clashes between environmental conservationists and animal welfare proponents, and on problems with traditional conservation measures in an era of climate change. She has published numerous articles on postcolonial literatures and literary theory, animal representation, and, with Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths, three books on postcolonial subjects. She authored Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2006) with Graham Huggan, and her most recent publication, with Robert Cribb and Helen Gilbert, is Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (2015). She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
RCC Research Project: Saving Indigenous Flora and Fauna in the Anthropocene
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Philosophies Clash: Conservation versus Animals
Selected Publications:
- With Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
- With Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths. Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998.
- Tiffin, Helen, ed. Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
- With Robert Cribb and Helen Gilbert. Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.
- “Do Insects Feel Pain?” Australasian Animal Studies Journal 5, no. 1 (2016): 80–96.