Kate Lewis Hood

Profile

Research interests

Poetic geographies, environmental humanities, Black studies, Indigenous studies, Pacific studies, feminist materialisms, queer theory

Working title

Overlapping currents: geopoetics with and against the Anthropocene

PhD research

My project explores embodied and watery geographies in a range of poetic work, focusing specifically on Black and Indigenous poetics that expose the conceptual and material enclosures of racial capitalism and colonialism and their reproductions in the Anthropocene. I develop the figure of ‘overlapping currents’ to move between poetic work from the Caribbean, North America, and the Pacific islands, using ‘currents’ to attend both to specific waters and to the multiple temporalities emerging from the bodies of work. I suggest that these poetics generate situated and multilayered critiques of the Anthropocene, while also opening possibilities beyond critique to witness and hold space for the fractures of racial, colonial, gendered, and ecological violence and engage poetry as a spatial, temporal, and relational practice.

Supervisors

• Professor Kathryn Yusoff, School of Geography
• Professor Andrea Brady, School of English and Drama

Academic background

• BA (Hons) English Literature, University of Cambridge
• MScR English Literature: Critical Theory, University of Edinburgh

Funding

• QMUL Principal’s Postgraduate Research Studentship

Research

Publications

• ‘In the “fissures of infrastructure”: poetry and toxicity in “Garbage Arcadia”’, Environmental Humanities, forthcoming spring 2021.
• ‘Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene: Lisa Robertson’s The Weather and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2 (2018), 181-96.
• ‘Intoxicated feminisms and the politics of the visible: Khairani Barokka’s Indigenous Species’, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, 1 (2018).

Dissemination

Conference presentations

• ‘“Where America’s Day Begins”: ecopoetics on the edge in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory’, A Place on the Edge? ASLE Postgraduate Conference, University of the Highlands and Islands, 2018.
• ‘Toxic poetics: Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43 and Khairani Barokka’s Indigenous Species’, Of Borders and Ecologies: Comparative Literature and the Environment Symposium, Birmingham City University, 2017.
• ‘“A fog so thick covered us that we could scarcely see”: unknowing the Anthropocene in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift’, Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation Symposium, University of Edinburgh, 2017.