Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Literature and Law
- Postcolonial and decolonial studies
- Marine and maritime literatures
- Environmental Humanities
Current research
I am currently involved in three areas of research. The first focuses on the representation of piracy in legal and fictional texts. This work addresses the impact of imaginative and regulatory representations of ‘the pirate’ on definitions of the ocean as a legal geography, and as a site of both freedom and unfreedom. This project connects to a second current of research on the critical power of fiction and poetry to raise questions about ‘human rights’ as a pre-eminent language for expressing liberty. A newer, third project involves a turn to more material matters. This work addresses the role that the arts—and particularly creative writing—can play in mitigating coastal waste, increasing ocean literacy, and in attending to the more-than-human in local seascapes.