Greg Garrard

Greg Garrard, PhD

Professor

English, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, Sustainability

On Leave Until: June 30, 2024
Other Titles: Environmental Humanities
Email: greg.garrard@ubc.ca

Graduate student supervisor

Research Summary

Ecocriticism; contemporary environmental writing; critical animal studies; culture and climate change; literature and science.

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 as 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 has also taught a three week residential course, ‘In Pursuit of the Whale’, at Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre in 2016 and 2018. Students combine traditional classroom discussion of literature with place-based learning, including whale-watching, hiking in the rainforest, and touring Kiixin, an abandoned Huu-Aye-Aht whaling village. The course will run again in summer 2023.

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. He has recently completed a thorough revision of the book for publication in late 2022. Greg has given keynote lectures across Asia, Europe and North America, and he co-edits Environmental Cultures, a Bloomsbury Academic book series, that currently has 24 titles in print.

Greg’s interests are somewhat ungovernable: his page on academia.edu collects 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 would be interested in supervising undergraduate and graduate research in environmental criticism and theory; human-animal studies; environmental education; culture and climate change; and British Columbian literature. In the period 2020-2026, he will be focusing on his SSHRC Insight project, ‘Kelownafornia: Cultures of Nature in the Okanagan Valley’. 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

Selected Publications & Presentations

Books

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

Garrard, Greg, ‘Derek Jarman’s Gay Georgic’, Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre, ed. T. Somerville and S. Edney, Routledge, forthcoming

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, forthcoming

Garrard, Greg. ‘Brexit Ecocriticism’, Green Letters, 2020, 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 over five years). The research team includes colleagues from the Faculties of Management, Science, Arts and Social Sciences, Creative and Critical Studies, and the Okanagan Institute of Education.