David Shackleton

I am a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. My research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary literature and the environment. I am particularly interested in the ways in which literature engages—or fails to engage—with the current environmental crisis.

My first book, called British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time, is published by Oxford University Press. This book assesses the environmental politics of British modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth system. This project grew out of my AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, and has already issued in articles in Modernism/modernity, Victorian Literature and Culture, and The Review of English Studies.

Turning to more recent speculative fiction, my second book project is called ‘Visions of the Future: Afrofuturism, Risk, and the Environment’. This project analyses novels by Octavia E. Butler and N. K. Jemisin, films by Wanuri Kahiu and Ryan Coogler, and music by Sun Ra and Janelle Monáe, reading them alongside various policy documents, scenarios, and risk reports. It argues that Afrofuturism provides counter-visions of the future that are urgently needed to combat climate capitalism, and the way in which it continues to foreclose the futures of many Black lives.
I am currently writing a monograph called Anthropocene Modernism: Time, History and the Modernist Novel. By demonstrating how the experimental narratives of H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Olive Moore and Jean Rhys refigure the temporality of modernity and the historical situations about which they wrote, this project offers an innovative assessment of the eco-politics of modernism.

I have published articles in The Review of English Studies and Victorian Literature and Culture, and interview regularly for the book-recommendation website Five Books.