Profile
I am an interdisciplinary scholar and writer working between literature, geography, and poetic practice. Across my work, I think about how poetry addresses places, environments, and the relationships that compose (and re/decompose) them, with an emphasis on anti-colonial, queer and feminist approaches. I grew up in the East Midlands (UK), and I’ve been living near or on the waterways in East London since 2018 when I started my PhD at Queen Mary. Before returning here as a lecturer, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and Royal Holloway University of London.
My doctoral research considered how Black and Indigenous poetics in North America and the Pacific islands address the durational effects of colonialism and racial capitalism in watery places, and configure other possible social and ecological relationships.
As a poet and writer, I’m interested in experimental modes of sensing environments and infrastructures. Listening, play, conversation, collaboration, and collectively questioning and reimagining space and power are important elements in my writing and teaching.
Undergraduate Teaching
I currently teach:
- ESH4101 Introduction to Creative Writing
- ESH5103 Creative Writing Prose
- ESH6043 Creative Writing Prose Fiction
I have previously taught:
- ESH123 Narrative
- ESH124 Poetry
- ESH5102 Creative Writing Poetry
- GEG5142 Colonial Lives and Afterlives
- GEG6153 Urban Water In and Beyond the Pipes
- ESH6107 The Poetics of Translation
- ESH6199 Creative Writing Dissertation
Postgraduate Teaching
- ESH7110 Collaborative Practices
Research
Research Interests:
- Environmental humanities and ecopoetics
- Contemporary experimental poetry
- Indigenous studies
- Black studies
- Feminist and queer theory
- Critical infrastructure studies
- Place-based pedagogies
Recent and ongoing research:
Overlapping Currents: Anti-Colonial Poetics of Water
From the depths of the Atlantic Ocean to water pipes in Flint, Michigan, from diverted streams in Hawai‘i to redeveloped docklands in London, how water circulates through places and bodies in a time of environmental breakdown is shaped by planetary forces of empire and capitalism. As Indigenous water protectors assert, water is life – but how are waters mapped, known, and related through poetry?
My current book project, Overlapping Currents: Anti-Colonial Poetics of Water, reads poetic work by Indigenous and Black writers from North America and the Pacific islands, including No‘u Revilla, m. nourbeSe philip, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Heid E. Erdrich, Sage U‘ilani Takehiro and Brandy Nālani McDougall. Developing an interdisciplinary approach, the book considers formal and political elements of this poetic work alongside place-based practices of performance, water protection activism, and decolonial infrastructure-making. Through sustained engagement with Black and Indigenous queer feminisms, the book traces how Black and Indigenous poetics perceive durational and non-linear forms of dispossession, extraction, and ecocide shaping watery places, and configure other possible socio-ecological relationships. These radical poetic practices presence multiple temporalities and intricately fluid relationships for resurgent hydrological life, disrupting colonial and capitalist narratives that continue to enclose waters amid uneven environmental breakdown.
Coneffluents
I am currently working on a creative-critical project, Coneffluents, in collaboration with poet/biologist Dr Jac Common. This project attends to colonial histories and queer wetland ecologies in the Port of London and along the River Thames, through walking and boating, poetry and hybrid essaying, visual and sonic practices, and collaborative workshops.
Other research activities
With Dr Ananya Mishra, I co-convene the Indigenous Studies Theory and Methods reading group for the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies, University of York.
With artist Therese Keogh, I co-founded and facilitate Turbid Circulations, a writing and research group for scholars and practitioners working on topics around water, coloniality, infrastructure, and creative practices for more reciprocal, redistributive, and resurgent life.
Publications
Peer-reviewed journal articles
Lewis Hood, K., and J. Gabrys (2024) ‘Keeping time with digital technologies: From real-time environments to forest futurisms.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 42(4), https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241229896.
Lewis Hood, K. (2023) ‘Residual repertoire: Black geo-aesthetics after the mine.’ GeoHumanities, 9(1): 45–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2023.2173081.
Lewis Hood, K. (2021) ‘In the “fissures of infrastructure”: poetry and toxicity in “Garbage Arcadia”.’ Environmental Humanities, 13(1): 136-58, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8867241.
Lewis Hood, K. (2018) ‘Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene: Lisa Robertson’s The Weather and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift.’ Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 22(2): 181-96, https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2018.1472029.
Creative/creative-critical publications
Lewis Hood, K., and M. O’Brien (2024) Glitch Almanac. Outside Press, published as a response to O’Brien’s durational artwork of ephemeral measure.
Lewis Hood, K., and J. Common (2023) ‘Loop wrenches then it breaks.’ Futch. https://www.futchpress.info/post/loop-wrenches-then-it-breaks.
Lewis Hood, K., and J. Common (2023) ‘Port Motions.’ Sonic Acts Ecoes, vol 5.
Lewis Hood, K., and others (2023) Field Docket, ed. by J. Diamanti and F. Carter. Sonic Acts.
Lewis Hood, K (2021) Bugbear. London: Veer2.
Lewis Hood, K., and M. Sledmere (2021) Tangents: Letters on Etel Adnan. MAP Magazine, 61, https://mapmagazine.co.uk/tangents-letters-on-etel-adnan-part-one.
Lewis Hood, K., and T. Keogh (2020) ‘Besides cramped currents…’ in R. Williams and M. Sledmere (eds) The Weird Folds: Everyday Poems from the Anthropocene. Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe: 181–88.
Lewis Hood, K. (2020) Thundersweet. London: Earthbound Press. Edition of 52.
Lewis Hood, K., and M. Sledmere (2020) infra·structure. Carmarthenshire: Broken Sleep Books.
Lewis Hood, K. (2019) SWATCH. Edinburgh: glyph press. Edition of 20.
My writing has been published in digital and print publications including Adjacent Pineapple, -algia, amberflora, Blackbox Manifold, DATABLEED, Erotoplasty, Four Letter Word, FRONT HORSE, LUDD GANG, MOTE, Pfeil, Plumwood Mountain, SPAM, Still Point, tentacular, and Zarf. I have performed poetry across the UK, and on Montez Radio.
General audience publications
Lewis Hood, K. (2024) ‘Massive US-led naval exercises in Hawaii and Pacific islands reflect over a century of colonial exploitation of the region.’ The Conversation (UK), 25 July.
Editorial
With the poet Pratyusha, I co-founded and published eleven issues of the online ecopoetry magazine amberflora.
In 2017 I commissioned and co-edited a special folio on Pacific islander Climate Change Poetry with CHamoru poet Craig Santos Perez for the international literary journal The Missing Slate.
Public Engagement
I have facilitated multiple poetry workshops focusing on questions of environment, infrastructure, colonial afterlives, and socio-ecological futures in a range of interdisciplinary, public, community, and youth contexts.
Workshops
‘Two mouths, break flows’ with Jac Common, Canal Dream Art Festival, London, 11 August 2024.
‘Pipes, pumps, and the poetics of water infrastructure’, Surrey Poetry Festival, 15 May 2024.
‘Elemental Intimacies’ with Maria Sledmere, BACKLIT Gallery/Pending youth arts collective, Nottingham, 14 December 2023.
‘Poetry in the Watery Commons’, Bow Arts: Common Distributions, London Festival of Architecture, London, 1 July 2023.
‘infra·structure: community energy & collaborative poetic practice’ with Maria Sledmere, Andrew Raven Trust, Community Energy: Power, People and Policy, 13 June 2021.
‘Hydroproximities: collaborative and creative-critical approaches to water infrastructures’ with Maria Sledmere and Aster Hoving, World/Water Futures: Blue Futures, 30 April 2021.
‘Women’s poetry publication workshop’ with Lila Matsumoto, Nottingham Women’s Centre, 18-25 January 2019.
