Dr Cheryl Lousley of Lakehead University has joined IASH this month as an Environmental Humanities visiting fellow, until the end of July.
Dr Lousley’s project, ‘Environmental Narrative and Memory in Contemporary Canadian Fiction’, focuses on contemporary Canadian authors who write about cultural memory in relation to the extractive industries that have long been central to Canadian regional and national economies. The study examines how and why ecological relationships involving the dangerous, labour-intensive, extractive industries of mining, oil, and gas are refracted through public (and not only private) practices of mourning and memorializing in the fiction of a number of contemporary Canadian writers, including Sheldon Currie, Alistair MacLeod, Lisa Moore, and Michael Winter. My analytic approach involves identifying and reading textual representations of what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as environmental “friction,” where the seemingly seamless flows of capital, resources, and commodities grapple with biophysical, social, and political resistance and failure
Biography
Dr. Cheryl Lousley is Associate Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University Orillia in Canada. She is the founding editor of the Environmental Humanities book series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press and the Canadian editor of Resilience: Journal of the Environmental Humanities. She has held a Fulbright Research Chair in the Department of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, and a Carson Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich. Her work appears in several landmark collections of ecocriticism, including The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism; Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context; and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on the imagined world conjured and contested at the public hearings of the 1983-1987 World Commission on Environment and Development.
