Wasinrat Nualsiri Modern Languages PhD Researcher

Hi, I'm Wasinrat Nualsiri and I studied Modern Languages PhD Researcher within Humanities Graduate School at the University of Southampton.

I am a full-time international postgraduate research student in Modern Languages. I have a background in English and American Literature with a focus on literature and the environment. I obtained my BA in English from Chiang Mai University, Thailand in 2002, and MA in English Literature from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand in 2006. Since 2012 I have received a scholarship from Naresuan University, Thailand where I have taught to do my doctoral dissertation at the University of Southampton.

My research project is about the teaching of ecocriticism in the foreign literature classroom in the Thai higher education institution. I particularly look at the role literature plays to raise the students’ ecological awareness in the English literature curriculum. To this end, I analyse the literary texts taught in some of the Environmental Literature modules at the Thai universities. My examples are taken from the ‘canon’ of American literature but also from ‘ecofeminist’, indigenous and post-colonial literature.

I show how the literary texts I discuss deal in a similar way with the transformation of the characters’ attitudes towards the natural world. Changes of their values, beliefs and attitudes tend to occur as a result of their interaction with the natural environment. I also examine how education helps modify the human-centred system of values, beliefs and attitudes, and how engagement with literary texts can act as a substitute for actual experience.

Supervisors: Prof. Andrea Reiter and Dr. Karin Zotzmann
Contact: [email protected]