Dr Emily McGiffin

Assistant Professor in World and Postcolonial Literatures

Address: 5.20 Fine Arts Building, University Road
University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL

About

I am an Assistant Professor in World and Postcolonial Literatures in the University of Warwick’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. I have held previous positions at University College London (UCL), the University of British Columbia, Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

Research Interests

My interdisciplinary research is grounded in postcolonial ecocriticism and intersects with critical race studies, environmental history, and critical geography. I am particularly interested in human relationships with landscape, their expression through literary and performance arts, and how heritage, memory, identity, and emotion are affected by extractive industries.

My current book project examines the impacts of dispossession and environmental damage that have accompanied the expansion and internationalisation of mining in West Africa. With emphasis on Guinea and Burkina Faso, I examine how the arts serve as repositories of cultural memory in situations of rapid and profound environmental change. I also engage with the concept of “extractivism,” a term originating in Latin American studies that has become a buzzword in various disciplines.

My previous monograph, Of Land, Bones, and Money: Towards a South African Ecocriticism, examined the environmental politics of written and oral literature in South African society and the shifting role of amaXhosa iimbongi (oral praise poets) from colonial times to the present. Looking at written and oral examples in English and isiXhosa from the past century, I showed that this literature has played a vital role in constituting understandings of and resistance to the social and environmental impacts of extractive capitalism and uneven development. During a year spent in South Africa, I interviewed iimbongi and their audiences and attended literary performances in rural Eastern Cape communities. My research showed that iimbongi remain a respected source of knowledge and cultural identity, helping to heal the psychic trauma and environmental injustice wrought by colonialism and apartheid.

I am also the author of three collections of poetry.

Teaching and Supervision

In 2024-25, I will be teaching on the second half of the module Studies in Postcolonial Literature.

Past modules taught include Global Literature and the Climate Crisis, Environmental Literature, Memory and Literature in a Globalised Culture, Reading Animals, Readings in Narrative, Academic Composition, Sustainability Graduate Seminar, and Professionalisation Graduate Seminar. I aim to help students develop theoretical knowledge, writing skills, and the ability to think expansively and critically, thus style, structure, argumentation, collaboration, creative problem solving, and public speaking are key elements of my teaching.

I welcome inquiries from graduate students interested in all aspects of Environmental Humanities, and especially projects pertaining to African and Indigenous literatures, extractive industries, colonialism and settler colonialism, multispecies and animal studies, or landscape and memory. Please email me with your queries.

Selected Publications

Scholarly Books

Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics. University of Virginia Press, 2019.

Creative Books

Into the Continent. University of Regina Press, 2024.

Subduction Zone. Pedlar Press, 2014. (Winner of the 2015 Creative Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE))

Between Dusk and Night. Brick Books, 2012. (Finalist for the Canadian Authors’ Association Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award)

Refereed Journals and Book Chapters

“Space and Place.” Routledge Handbook of Health and Environmental Humanities. Eds. Amber Abrams, Victoria Bates, Rocio Gomez, Routledge, 2025. [Under review]

“Field work: rural residencies and environmental arts.” Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada. Eds. Amanda White and Elysia French. Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2024.

“Transatlantic Extractions in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return.” Canadian Literature, vol. 253 (Poetics and Extraction), 2023, pp. 17-37.

with Philip Aghoghvwia.“African ecopoetics.” Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. Eds. Julia Fiedorczuk, Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Orchard Tierney, Routledge, 2023, pp. 285-294.

“Material modernities: Aluminum in the making of a global cultural economy.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 2023, pp. 475-484.

“Gender, race, and the biopolitics of extractivism in the poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho”. Research in African Literatures, vol. 53, no. 4, 2023, pp. 60-78.

“Conflicted Colonialisms: multidimensional violence in the western Sahel.”Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, vol. 6, no. 4-6 (Territory and Decolonisation), 2022, pp. 320-336.

“Raced and Erased: The workings of settler colonialism and environmental violence in the poetry of Jordan Abel.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, vol. 29, no. 2, 2022, pp.

“The laudable cow: poetics of human/cattle relationships.” In: Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices. Ed. Ida Bencke and Jørgen Bruhn. Punctum Books, 2022.

with Jennifer Hamilton, Astrida Neimanis, Catriona Sandilands and Sue Reid. “Wrack Writing (Selections).” Feminist Review, vol. 130, no. 115-119 (Oceans), 2022, pp. 115-119.

“Academic-practitioner collaboration in an age of precarity.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2020, pp. 306-325.

“Thukela Poswayo’s poetry of dwelling.” Geopoetics in Practice. Eds. E . Magrane, L. Russo, S. de Leeuw, C. Santos Perez, Routledge, 2019.

“Oral poetry and development ideology in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, vol. 2, no. 2-3 (Magic, Witchcraft, and Development), 2018, pp. 279-295.

“The izibongo of resistance: Praise poets, trade unions and the violence of extractive capitalism.” Green Letters, vol. 20, no. 2 (Ecologies of Labour), 2016, pp. 156-169.