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Greg Garrard, PhD
Professor
English, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, Sustainability
Other Titles: Environmental HumanitiesEmail: greg.garrard@ubc.ca
Graduate student supervisor
Research Summary
Ecocriticism; contemporary environmental writing; critical animal studies; culture and climate change; wildfire risk.
Courses & Teaching
English; Sustainability
Biography
Greg is an English-sounding Canadian who lived in the Netherlands, Lebanon, England and Wales before coming to Kelowna in 2013. While working at Bath Spa University in the west of England, he was a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Artswork Publishing Lab and later a Reader in environmental literature. He served as Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland) 2004-2010 and managing editor, later co-editor, of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 2008-2015.
Since coming to UBC, Greg has taught ‘Dog Tales’, ‘Climate Fiction’, ‘Anthropocene Culture’, ‘Writing Pollution’, ‘Canadian Environmental Writing’, ‘Reading Animals’ and ‘Bestial Passions’, a course on zoophile literature. He was promoted to Professor of Environmental Humanities in July 2018. He co-designed the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Sustainability Theme and the Bachelor of Sustainability degree, and took part in UBC’s Climate Emergency Task Force in summer 2020.
Greg is presently undertaking interdisciplinary research centred in the Okanagan-Similkameen watershed, which crosses the Canada-USA border at Oroville. He and his graduate students are studying cross-border conservation law, environmental governance, landscape aesthetics, and wildfire.
Degrees
PhD, University of Liverpool. ‘Ecological Literary Criticism: Two Case Studies’
MA, University of Wales, Swansea. ‘Philosophy and Principles of Literary Criticism’
BA (Hons), University of Wales, Swansea, English Literature and Philosophy
Research Interests & Projects
Greg is one of the best-known figures in environmental criticism worldwide. His Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004, 2011), the most widely used introduction to the field, has been translated into Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Turkish, and – in an unofficial Taiwanese edition – Mandarin Chinese. The third edition was published in 2023 with 85% new material, including a chapter on ‘Indigeneity’. Greg has given keynote lectures across Asia, Europe and North America, and he co-edits Environmental Cultures, a Bloomsbury Academic book series.
Greg’s interests are somewhat ungovernable: his academia.edu and Google Scholar pages include essays on Brexit and ecocriticism; rhododendrons and Romantic poetry; climate scepticism; Seamus Heaney, Heidegger and Nazism; air travel in climate change fiction; radical Canadian cinema, Werner Herzog and Wall-E; Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Derek Jarman, eco-pedagogy and feral dogs.
Greg is presently leading ‘Living with Wildfire in the BC Southern Interior’, a multidisciplinary research team looking at wildfire science, history, art, and governance. The cluster aims to integrate Indigenous and settler knowledges from several disciplines to enable British Columbians to live better with wildfire. Greg would be interested in supervising undergraduate and graduate research on the following topics:
- Landscape aesthetics
- Wildfire communication in media and literary fiction
- Killer whales (Orca orcinus) in science and culture
Please email for further information and graduate research assistant opportunities. Possible alternative topics for supervision include:
- Cultural ecology of wildfire
- Conservative environmentalisms and anti-environmentalist cultures
- Cetacean cultures/cetaceans in culture
- Zoophile literature
- Environmental misanthropy
Graduate Student Supervision
Daisy Pullman (PhD IGS Sustainability), 2022-present. Daisy is researching the political, economic and cultural differences between the Canadian Okanagan and the Okanogan region just over the border in the USA. She is part of a multidisciplinary team exploring how the idealization of the Okanagan has altered the landscape and ecology on either side of the 49th parallel.
Annie Furman (MFA Performance), 2022-present. Annie worked with Madeline on Riparian ReAnimation, a community workshop to make giant puppets of stream-adjacent creatures, which were later paraded at various City events. For her MFA thesis, Annie is working on a set of teaching materials on aspen, sturgeon, and bats for the use of environmental educators.
Yazdan Gordanpour (PhD IGS Sustainability), 2021-present. Yazdan is embarking on a ground-breaking multiscalar study of energy-infrastructure transitions in the Okanagan Valley from World War II into the present. He is curious about the cultural and political forces behind the construction of Highway 97C (the Coquihalla Connector), the beginning and expansions of Kelowna airport, the demise of the railway, and the launch of the city’s first active transportation plan.
Chhavi Mathur (MA IGS Sustainability), 2021-2024. Chhavi is nearing completion of her thesis on Beautiful British Columbia, a lifestyle and tourism magazine published by the province 1959-1984. She shows how the magazine cemented the settler colonial image of the province in this period, and especially the oasis idyll of the Okanagan Valley that still prevails.
Judee Burr (MA IGS Sustainability), 2020-2022. Judee’s thesis project, ‘Listening to Fire’, is a remarkable podcast on the history of wildfire in the Southern Interior. Burr’s podcast, researched and completed during a global pandemic, is an extraordinary scholarly document that draws on Indigenous and Euro-Canadian knowledges of fire.
Madeline Donald (PhD IGS Sustainability), 2019-2024. Madeline is nearing completion of her thesis, ‘Human-Riparian Relating at Valley Bottom’, which is principally a study of an unloved Kelowna watercourse called Brandt’s Creek. It includes reflections on a Riparian ReAnimation, a community workshop she co-organized to create giant puppets of riparian creatures. Madeline’s research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
Stephenie Hendricks (PhD IGS Sustainability), 2019-2024. Stephenie is nearing completion of her ambitious dissertation, an Open Educational Resource on environmental health and justice that includes a series of podcasts and unique essays. Steph’s inclusion of voices from many luminaries of EH/EJ is supported by a grant from the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies.
Rina Garcia Chua (PhD IGS Individualized), 2016-2022. Rina’s thesis, Migrant Ecocriticism: Unbinding Movements and Spaces in Anthologies of Ecopoetry, is an illuminating, deeply felt critique of the way belonging and migrancy are represented in a range of poetry anthologies. Rina is presently Jack and Doris Shadbolt Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University.
Selected Publications & Presentations
Books
Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (revised and expanded 3rd edn), Routledge 2023, 259pp.
Greg Garrard, Axel Goodbody, George Handley and Stephanie Posthumus, Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis, Bloomsbury Academic 2019, 288pp.
Garrard, Greg (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford University Press, 2014, 577pp.
Garrard, Greg (ed.). Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies, Palgrave Macmillan 2011 (pb edn: 2016), 174pp.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism (revised and expanded 2nd edn), Routledge 2011, 230 pp.
Ecocriticism, Routledge 2004, 224pp. (Translations: Ecocriticá, trans. V. Ribeiro, UnB [Brasilia University]
Selected Articles and Chapters
Sarah Raymond, Sarah E. Perkins and Greg Garrard, ‘The Species at Risk Act (2002) and Transboundary Species Listings in North America’, Humanities, 2024 (Vol.13, no.1): 38-56.
Garrard, Greg. ‘Two Cheers for Empirical Ecocriticism’, Empirical Ecocriticism, ed. F.Hakemulder, W. Małecki, M. Schneider-Mayerson and A. Weik von Mossner, University of Minnesota Press, August 2023, 319-330
Garrard, Greg, ‘Derek Jarman’s Gay Georgic’, Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre, ed. T. Somerville and S. Edney, Routledge, 2022, 212-226
Garrard, Greg. ‘Brexit Ecocriticism’, Green Letters, 2020 (Vol.24, no.2): 1-15. DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2020.1788409
Garrard, Greg. ‘Ecocriticism as Narrative Ethics: Richard Powers’s Gain’, in Eco-Narratologies, ed. E. James and E. Morel, Ohio University Press, 2020, 107-126
Garrard, Greg. ‘Never Too Soon, Always Too Late: Reflections on climate temporality’, WiRES Climate Change, October 2019 (Vol.5, no.1)
Garrard, Greg. ‘Towards an Unprecedented Ecocritical Pedagogy’, in Teaching Literature: Text and Dialogue in the English Classroom, ed. B. Knights, 2017, Palgrave, 189-207.
Garrard, Greg. ‘Bestial Humans and Sexual Animals: Zoophilia in Law and Literature’, in Animalities, ed. M. Lundblad, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 211-235.
Garrard, Greg. ‘The Environmental Humanities: Notes Towards a Summary for Policymakers’, in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. U. Heise and J. Christensen, Routledge, 2016, 446-456.
Garrard, Greg. ‘Memories of Snow: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Re-reading’, Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences, ed. S. Groes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 163-169.
Garrard, Greg. ‘Solar: Apocalypse Not’, in Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2nd edn), ed. S. Groes, Continuum, 2013, 123-136.
Garrard, Greg. ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Green: Air Travel, Climate Change and Literature’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2013 (Vol. 17, no. 2): 175-188.
Selected Grants & Awards
In 2006, Greg was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship, the highest award for university teaching in the UK. Two years later, he won the coveted ‘Best Dressed Lecturer’ award at Bath Spa University. In 2018, he was included on UBC’s Honour Roll for Teaching thanks to the excellent feedback he received from students.
Greg is Principal Investigator on ‘Kelownafornia: Cultures of Nature in the Okanagan Valley’, a multidisciplinary project funded by SSHRC’s Insight grant ($276410, 2019-2025). The research team includes graduate students specializing in literary studies, ethnobotany, landscape architecture, political science, and anthropology.
In 2023, Greg was named UBC Okanagan Researcher of the Year (SSHRC discipline).
Professional Services/Affiliations/Committees
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
Heterodox Academy
Media
The Conversation: Endangered by the 49th Parallel
INFOTEL: Okanagan and Okanogan: One land, worlds apart
The National News (Abu Dhabi): Trail of Devastation: Counting the cost after a summer of wildfires
In the Field: Chasing the Whale
CBC Ideas: Roaming Imagination: What the stories we tell about bears say about us