African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary

Kirk Sides

206 Ingraham Hall
@ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
https://africa.wisc.edu/event/african-literatures-ecological-imaginary/

Kirk Sides is an Assistant Professor in English and an Affiliate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After receiving his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA, Kirk was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa. A specialist in African environmental literatures and humanities, his current book manuscript, Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) charts a long history of ecological thinking in African literatures from the start of twentieth century up to the present. His next project, based in the Okavango Delta region of Botswana, will employ fieldwork and community-based workshops to explore relationships between environmental precarity, climate change, and storytelling. Kirk has published articles on African literatures and the environment in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race, and others. He also facilitates a series of workshops called “Anthropocene Storytelling”, which employ speculative fiction and poetry as pedagogical and creative methods for thinking about planetary change. This series has traveled to the UK, South Africa, and multiple institutions across the US. Kirk has been a Visiting Research Scholar in the Humanities Institute at The Pennsylvania State University, as well as a Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.