Professor Graeme Macdonald
Professor
Email: g dot macdonald at warwick dot ac dot uk
5.16
Faculty of Arts Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
About
Dr Graeme Macdonald is Professor, and teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program. MA (Jt Hons in Literature and Sociology) Aberdeen; PhD (Glasgow); (PGCHE) Warwick.
Research interests
Current research interests include Resource Culture in World Literature/Globalisation; Energy Humanities and Petrofiction; Environmental Humanities, Science Fiction; Modern and Contemporary Scottish and British Culture. I am editor of Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature (EUP 2011) and Post Theory: New Directions in Criticism (EUP, 1999). I have recently edited a new edition of John McGrath's play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (2015) Currently preparing a monograph, Petrofiction: Oil and World Literature. I am a member of WreC (Warwick Research Collective), who work on new ways to think about World Literature/Literature in the World. We have published a co-written monograph on Peripheral Modernism and World Literature: Combined and Uneven Development: Toward a New Theory of World Literature (LUP: 2015) I was Co-Investigator on the RSE Research Network, Connecting with a Low Carbon Scotland (2016-18).
I am at present CI on the multi-national project Climaginaries: narrating socio-cultural transitions to a post-fossil society, funded by FORMAS (Swedish Research Council)
Teaching and supervision
Research supervision: I would welcome research projects in the fields of energy humanities and petroculture, environmental humanities, climate change and climate imaginaries, science fiction, modern Scottish/British literature and culture, materialist projects on world literature.
I have currently have two PhD students:
- Nora Castle (Food, Foodways, and Environmental Crisis in Contemporary Speculative Fiction)
- Harry Pitt-Scott (The Offshore Imaginary: Fossil Finance and Petroculture, 1973-2008
- I have supervised the following PhD projects:
- Lara Choksey (‘Life Itself’ in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction: Evolution, Epigenetics and Culture)
- Rhys Williams (Cognitive Impurities: A Political Approach to Fantastic Fiction in the Neoliberal Age)
- Chris Maughan (Activism Ltd – Environmental Activism and Contemporary Literature)
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Gemma Goodman, (Alternative Cornwalls: Constructing Place in Victorian and Modern Cornish Literature)
-
Sumana Ray, (Beyond Multiculturalism: the emergence of the liminal Briton in contemporary British Asian women’s writing) (part-supervision)
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Natasha Dunn, (Trauma in Six Late Twentieth Century Women’s Novels)
- I have also supervised MA Dissertations in a variety of topics, including:
Dostoevsky and World-Literature"
Petro-Apocalypse: Three Novels of the end of oil
Petro-Gothic: the grotesque body in Caribbean Petrofiction
Globalisation, Reification, and the Culture Industry in the 20th Century
Contemporary Mythopoeia: Chuck Palahniuk and Haruki Murakami
H.P. Lovecraft: Fantasy, Politics, and Reality
Magic Realism in Calvino and Carter
My BA options include:
MA options include Petrofiction: Studies in World Literature.
Selected recent publications
- Editor (inc. extensive Introduction): John McGrath's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (Bloomsbury 2015)
- Co-author, with Warwick Research Collective Monograph: Combined and Uneven Development: Toward a New Theory of World Literature (LUP: 2015)
- Co-ed., Post Theory: New Directions in Criticism (EUP, 1999),
- Co-ed., Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Contexts and Critical Perspectives (EUP 2011)
- "Containing Oil: The Pipeline in Petroculture", Petrocultures: Oil, Culture, Politics (McGill-Queens UP: 2017)
- "Monstrous Transformer: Petrofiction and World Literature", Journal of Postcolonial Writing Special Issue: "Resistant Resources/Resources of Resistance: World-Literature, World-Literature and Energetic Materialism", Vol 53, no. 3, 2017
- "Fiction", in Szeman, Yaeger, and Wenzel (eds), Fueling Culture (Fordham University Press: 2017)
- Co-writer (with After Oil School Collective): After Oil (Petrocultures Research Group: Alberta, 2016)
- (Co-Author) “Teaching Climate Change in the Neoliberal University”, Lemenager & Hall (eds), Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities (London: Routledge, 2016)
- "Impossibility Drives: the Energy of SF", Paradoxa Vol. 26 (2014): 111-144. (Winner of SFRA Pioneer Award, 2015) (Reprinted in Online SF Journal Strange Horizons, April 2016)
- "The Resources of Fiction", Reviews in Cultural Theory Vol 4, Issue 2 (2013): 1-24. (Reprinted in Energy Humanities: An Anthology, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer (eds) (Baltimore Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)
- "Oil and World Literature", American Book Review, March/April 2012, Vol. 33, No. 3
- "The Kilted Dragon: Contemporary Scottish Fiction and the New Imperialism", in Within/Without Empire: Scotland Across the (Post)Colonial Borderline (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013): 150-67.
- "Scottish Extractions: 'Race' and Racism in Devolutionary Fiction", Orbis Litterarum, Vol. 65: 2, (2010), 79-107
- "Green Links: Ecosocialism and Contemporary Scottish Writing", in Ecology and the Literature of the British Left (2012)
- "Postcolonialism and Scottish Studies", New Formations: After Iraq, 59 Autumn (2006)
Qualifications
- MA [Jt Hons] (Aberdeen)
- PhD (Glasgow)
Office hours 2022/23 (Room 5.16)
Term 1: Thursdays 9-10, 4-5 or by appointment or Teams
Term 2: Wednesdays 12-1; Thursdays 330-430
Term 3: Wednesdays 12-1; Thursdays 4-5. But also by appointment and online if that works easier for you.
If you can't make the above times, email me and we can arrange a time.
Teaching
Undergraduate modules
EN2/3BO The European Novel
EN2/3F5 Alternative Lifeworlds
EN122 Modes of Reading