What is environmental humanities? How are scholars reconsidering our approach to the natural world, and where can you go to learn more? In the second of a two-part episode on the environmental humanities, host Roxana talks to Kate Rigby, Christine Okoth and Peter Riley – three academics who approach environmental concepts from very different perspectives in their work.

They discuss the difficulties of thinking about the future, postcolonial approaches to ecocriticism and the political problems of 'pure' nature. Kate Rigby is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities at University of Cologne, where she directs the centre for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities. A well established figure in the environmental humanities, her most recent monograph, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (2020) reconsiders the ecopoetic legacies of British Romanticism through a decolonial lens. Christine Okoth is Lecturer in Literature and Cultures of the Black Atlantic at King’s College London. Having recently completed a position as Research Fellow in the English Department at the University of Warwick, she is currently writing a book about ecology, extraction, and contemporary literature. Peter Riley is Associate Professor in Poetry and Poetics at Durham University. His recent book, Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger (2022), won the Ideas Prize for non-fiction. He is currently editing Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass for the Oxford World's Classics series (forthcoming 2022), and his academic research examines nineteenth through twentieth century poetry in relation to labour history, Marxism, and archival studies.

Date of episode recording: 2022-04-18

Duration: 00:46:14

Language of episode: English

Presenter: Roxana Toloza Chacon

Guests: Kate Rigby, Christine Okoth, Peter Riley

Producer: Damian Walsh; Assistant Producer: Anna De Vivo; Editor: Daniel Lewis