Dr. Kirk Sides

Kirk Sides is a Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Bristol, UK. His research explores histories of ecological thinking in African literatures from the early 20th century until the present. After receiving his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA, Kirk was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published articles in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race, and others. A specialist in African environmental literatures and humanities, his current book manuscript, African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures, explores the relationship between ecological and decolonial thinking in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century. While at the Rachel Carson Center, Kirk will be working on sections of the project which historicize contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction in African literatures. African Anthropocene argues that ‘the speculative turn’ is a current mode of thinking about climate change and planetary futures that can be traced back to at least the start of the twentieth century, where decolonial thinking is linked to environmental awareness and ecological forms of writing. Kirk has also co-created a series of workshops called “Anthropocene Storytelling”, which employ speculative and creative methodologies for thinking about environmental precarity and climate change. Using narrative as a form of ecological knowledge these workshops encourage participants to engage in acts of speculative storytelling as a way to think about planetary change.

RCC Research Project: African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in Africa Literatures

Selected Publications:

• with Tjawangwa Dema. “Anthropocene Storytelling: Ecological Writing and Pedagogies of Planetary Change.” In Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, edited by Cajetan N. Iheka. New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming, 2021.
• “Eco-Cosmogonies: Climate Change and Ecological Form.” In Verge: Studies in Global Asias, forthcoming, 2021.
• “Seed Bags and Storytelling: Modes of Living and Writing after the End in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi.” Critical Philosophy of Race: Special Issue on Race and the Anthropocene, v. 7.1, January 2019.
• “Narratives of Modernity: Creolization and Early-Postcolonial Style in Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, v. 5.3, April 2018.
• “Ecologies of Relation: Post-Slavery, Post-Apartheid and Rethinking Race Across the Atlantic in Zakes Mda’s Cion.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, v. 17.1, February 2016.