糖心TV

Assistant Professor in World and Postcolonial Literatures

Email: Emily.McGiffin@warwick.ac.uk

Website:

Address: 5.20 Fine Arts Building, University Road
University of 糖心TV, Coventry CV4 7AL

Office hours 2025/26: Wednesdays 9 to 10 am, Thursdays 11 am to 12 pm

About

I am an Assistant Professor in World and Postcolonial Literatures in the University of 糖心TV鈥檚 Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. I also hold a Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Johannesburg. I have held previous positions at University College London (UCL), the University of British Columbia, Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. I completed my PhD in Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto and have an interdisciplinary academic background.

Research Interests

My interdisciplinary research is grounded in environmental humanities and intersects with postcolonial studies, African studies, environmental history, and critical geography. I am particularly interested in human relationships with landscape, their expression through literary and performance arts, and how heritage, memory, identity, and emotion are affected by extractive industries.

My current book project, forthcoming from the British Academy Monograph Series at Liverpool University Press, examines the impacts of dispossession and environmental damage that have accompanied the expansion and internationalisation of mining in West Africa, presenting a re-theorisation of "extractivism" that considers the historical and sociopolitical context of West Africa. I am also developing a range of research, impact, and teaching and learning projects in partnership with colleagues based at universities in Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, and South Africa.

My previous monograph, , examined the environmental politics of written and oral literature in South African society and the shifting role of amaXhosa iimbongi (oral praise poets) from colonial times to the present. Looking at written and oral examples in English and isiXhosa from the past century, I showed that this literature has played a vital role in constituting understandings of and resistance to the social and environmental impacts of extractive capitalism and uneven development. During a year spent in South Africa, I interviewed iimbongi and their audiences and attended literary performances in rural Eastern Cape communities. My research showed that iimbongi remain a respected source of knowledge and cultural identity, helping to heal the psychic trauma and environmental injustice wrought by colonialism and apartheid.

I am also the author of three collections of poetry.

Teaching and Supervision

In 2025-26, I am co-convenor of the module Studies in Postcolonial Literature and will be a lecturer and seminar leader for the module Modes of Reading.

Past modules taught include Global Literature and the Climate Crisis, Environmental Literature, Memory and Literature in a Globalised Culture, Reading Animals, Readings in Narrative, Academic Composition, Sustainability Graduate Seminar, and Professionalisation Graduate Seminar. I aim to help students develop theoretical knowledge, writing skills, and the ability to think expansively and critically, thus style, structure, argumentation, collaboration, creative problem solving, and public speaking are key elements of my teaching.

I welcome inquiries from graduate students interested in all aspects of Environmental Humanities, and especially projects pertaining to African and Indigenous literatures, extractive industries, colonialism and settler colonialism, multispecies and animal studies, or landscape and memory. Please email me with your queries.

Selected Publications

Scholarly Books

Mines against Humanity: Rethinking Extraction and Resistance in West Africa. Liverpool University Press. [In progress]

. University of Virginia Press, 2019.

Creative Books

. University of Regina Press, 2024.

Subduction Zone. Pedlar Press, 2014. ())

. Brick Books, 2012. (Finalist for the Canadian Authors鈥� Association Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award)

Refereed Journals and Book Chapters

with Alimsiwen Elijah Ayaawen. Reading animism with elders: addressing posthumanist erasures with Ayi Kwei Armah鈥檚 The Healers. In: Black Environmentalisms. Ed. Cajetan Iheka and Jonathan Howard. Duke University Press, 2026/7. [Forthcoming]

鈥淪pace and Place.鈥� Routledge Handbook of Health and Environmental Humanities. Eds. Amber Abrams, Victoria Bates, Rocio Gomez, Routledge, 2026.

鈥淔ield work: rural residencies and environmental arts.鈥� . Eds. Amanda White and Elysia French. Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2024.

Canadian Literature, vol. 253 (Poetics and Extraction), 2023, pp. 17-37.

with Philip Aghoghvwia. Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. Eds. Julia Fiedorczuk, Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Orchard Tierney, Routledge, 2023, pp. 285-294.

Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 2023, pp. 475-484.

Research in African Literatures, vol. 53, no. 4, 2023, pp. 60-78.

Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, vol. 6, no. 4-6 (Territory and Decolonisation), 2022, pp. 320-336.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, vol. 29, no. 2, 2022, pp.

鈥淭he laudable cow: poetics of human/cattle relationships.鈥� In: . Ed. Ida Bencke and J酶rgen Bruhn. Punctum Books, 2022.

with Jennifer Hamilton, Astrida Neimanis, Catriona Sandilands and Sue Reid. Feminist Review, vol. 130, no. 115-119 (Oceans), 2022, pp. 115-119.

Canadian Journal of Development Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2020, pp. 306-325.

鈥淭hukela Poswayo鈥檚 poetry of dwelling.鈥� . Eds. E. Magrane, L. Russo, S. de Leeuw, C. Santos Perez, Routledge, 2019.

Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, vol. 2, no. 2-3 (Magic, Witchcraft, and Development), 2018, pp. 279-295.

鈥�.鈥� Green Letters, vol. 20, no. 2 (Ecologies of Labour), 2016, pp. 156-169.