Kate Lewis Hood

Profile

Research interests
The Anthropocene; feminist environmental humanities; experimental poetry and poetics; new materialism; (bio/geo)political aesthetics; interdisciplinarity

PhD working title
‘Indeterminate mattering: critical poetics in the Anthropocene’

PhD research
My research considers the contribution of experimental poetic thinking around materiality, subjectivity, and geography to emerging critical formations of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene refers to a proposed geologic epoch in which humans have impacted on Earth systems and processes to such a degree that there will be a lasting geological record. My project draws connections between feminist new materialist thinking and contemporary poetic practices (in poetry and visual art) to interrogate assumptions embedded in the Anthropocene concept, in particular its universalising tendencies and colonial erasures. Relocating the Anthropocene in particular sites – the body, the archive, and the island – I engage with contemporary poetic works that both uncover such erasures in the logics, histories, and geographies of the Anthropocene, and develop alternative material imaginaries and political aesthetics.

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

Publications

• ‘Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene: Lisa Robertson’s The Weather and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2018.
  
• ‘Intoxicated feminisms and the politics of the visible: Khairani Barokka’s Indigenous Species’, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, 2018.

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.

Funding

• QMUL Research Studentship (School of English and Drama)

Research