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Overview

Dr Kerstin Oloff

Associate Professor


Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures+44 (0) 191 33 43447

Biography

My primary research areas include postcolonial studies, environmental humanities (including food studies and energy humanities), and feminism/SRT within Latin American, Caribbean and Comparative American studies. I have written on Gothic and sci-fi literary and filmic aesthetics within this context, focussing on the work of writers and filmmakers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the United States. My work has been published in leading academic journals, including Atlantic Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Green Letters and Latin American Research Review.

I regularly teach on a range of cultural and literary topics within the Latin American and Caribbean studies context, including Frida Kahlo and muralism, Cuban cinema, postcolonial and ecocritical debates in a Caribbean context, and literary interventions into debates around gender and sexuality.

I am the co-editor, with Michael Niblett (Warwick), of Perspectives on the Other America: Comparative Approaches to Latin American and Caribbean Culture (2009). With Chris Campbell (Exeter) and Michael Niblett, I am co-editor of Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology and Global Food System (forthcoming in 2021 with Palgrave). Currently, I am also co-editing, with Dr Sharae Deckard (UCD) and Dr Treasa de Loughry (UCD), the Routledge Companion to Literature and the Environment (under contract). My single-authored Ecology of the Zombie is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

At Durham, I have led research groups and events on the environmental humanities for many years. In 2014, I co-organised (with Michael Niblett and Chris Campbell) the seminar "Plotting the Crisis" (https://plottingthecrisis.wordpress.com/). In 2014, I established the "Ecologies and the Arts" research group, running regular seminars and talks. From 2015, I co-directed the group with Dr Laura Chuhan Campbell, who brought a focus on medieval literatures to it. In 2016, I organised the symposium "Aesthetics of Crisis: Ecology, Disaster and Representation"(https://aestheticsofcrisis.wordpress.com/about/). In 2016, I also co-organised the second annual conference of the World-Ecology Network, "World-Ecology, World-Culture, World-Economy: Crisis, Slump, Revolution?", which took place at Durham (https://worldecology2016.wordpress.com/). Since January 2020, I have been the Director of the Centre for Culture and Ecology, and am coordinating the talk series on ‘Capitalism, Nature and Climate Change’.

Research interests

  • Environmental Humanities (Eco-criticism and World-Ecology Studies)
  • Caribbean Studies and Latin American Studies
  • Feminism, Gender Studies and Social Reproduction Theory
  • Postcolonial Studies and Eco-materialism
  • Energy Humanities
  • Gothic and Speculative Fiction

Publications

Authored book

Book review

Chapter in book

Edited book

Journal Article

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

Scholarly Edition