Prof. Dr. Graham Huggan

Graham Huggan has been working in academia for over 30 years, during which time he has taught in the United States, Germany, and Britain, with extended research visits to Australia and Canada. Primarily a scholar in comparative postcolonial literary and cultural studies, with a PhD in comparative literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada, he has branched out in the last decade into the cross-disciplinary field of environmental humanities, which provides the focus for most of his recent work. Huggan is an experienced designer-director of international collaborative research projects, and has worked together with partners, academic and nonacademic, from several different countries, in Europe and elsewhere.

Australian Weather-Worlds, a relatively short but nonetheless full-length book of around 50,000 words, will seek to adopt a broadly postcolonial-ecocritical approach to four Australian writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Patrick White, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, and Alexis Wright. The White chapter, currently in progress, will examine White’s “green” credentials, focusing on early works such as The Tree of Man as well as later ones such as A Fringe of Leaves. The Wright chapter, for which some preliminary work has also been done, will look at forms of multispecies and/or climate justice in Carpentaria and The Swan Book. The proposed chapters on Grenville and Winton are as yet untouched, but initial ideas for them are as follows: the former chapter will explore the “atmospheres” concept, which has already attracted a fair amount of attention in the critical literature (Böhme, Morton, Oak Taylor, etc.); while the latter will look at the relationship between Winton’s fiction and his marine conservation advocacy. Once completed, the book will be submitted to University of Virginia Press for potential publication in its Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities book series.

RCC Research Project: Australian Weather-Worlds

Selected Publications:

• with Will Abberley, Christina Alt, David Higgins, and Pippa Marland. Modern British Nature Writing, 1789–2020: Land Lines. Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108123396.
• Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet. Bloomsbury, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350010925.
• with Lars Jensen, eds. Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North: Unscrambling the Arctic. Palgrave, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58817-3.
• with Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2015.
• ed. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199588251.001.0001.