Dr Yvonne Reddick

Research Fellow in Modern English and World Literatures

yvonne_reddickYvonne Reddick is a scholar of environmental poetry and postcolonial environmental literature. She is the recipient of an AHRC-funded Leadership Fellowship (ECR), to analyse, write, commission and publish poetry that engages with the Anthropocene. The 2020 IBAR and MIDEX conference ‘The Anthropocene and Race’ stems from this research. She is also a widely published poet and translator of poetry.

Reddick’s articles on postcolonial ecocriticism focus on writing about environmental justice from the Niger Delta oilfields, and rivers in the work of transatlantic novelist Caryl Phillips. Other postcolonial work includes research on Paul Lomami Tchibamba, the DR Congo’s first novelist, and archival research on Nigerian author Amos Tutuola. Her articles appear in high-quality journals such as Wasafiri, ISLE and Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. She received a Guest Research Fellowship at Linnaeus University, Sweden, to pursue this research in 2016, and a Harry-Ransom Center Fellowship grant in 2017.

Background

Yvonne Reddick read English at Cambridge, where she worked with the environmental aesthetics expert and bestselling author, Dr. Robert Macfarlane. She studied her MA at the University of York, where she strengthened her interest in postcolonial environments. She moved to the University of Warwick to work with Professor Jonathan Bate, a leader in the field of British environmental literary criticism. She began her career with an Early Career Fellowship at Warwick, where she founded the IAS and EPSRC-funded Environmental Studies Research Network, in collaboration with colleagues from Chemistry and Law.

Projects

Yvonne’s research has recently focused on British environmental poetry, especially the work of Ted Hughes. She is working on the first book-length study of Hughes’ environmental writing. Yvonne’s work on Hughes’ letters, unpublished diaries and poems from Kenyan Lake Victoria, where he and his son conducted environmental research on the Nile perch, inspired her new research project on Africa’s rivers.Yvonne’s latest research project re-interprets the Congo and Niger Rivers as sites of environmental conflict, showing how literature in English and French engages with environmental and postcolonial issues. Yvonne has recently been appointed Visiting Fellow of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery at the University of Liverpool, and Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Publications

Journal articles – In Print:

  • ‘The Fisher King, the Grail and the Goddess: Ted Hughes’s aquatic myths’, MHRA Working Papers for the Humanities, Vol. 5, 2010.
  • ‘ “After Lorca” ’: Ted Hughes and the Influence of Federico García Lorca’, Modern Language Review 108.13, July 2013, 703-22.
  • ‘Henry Williamson and Ted Hughes: politics, nationhood and nature-writing’. English (Oxford Journals) 62.39, Winter 2013.
  • ‘ “Throttle College”? Ted Hughes’s Cambridge Poetry.’ Cambridge Quarterly. Forthcoming in September 2015.

Journal articles – In Press:

  • ‘ ‘Icthyologue’: Scientific language in the poetry of Ted Hughes’. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (Oxford Journals). In press.

Chapters in edited books:

  • ‘Ted Hughes and Federico García Lorca: The tragic theatre of mourning’ chapter in Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected, ed. by Terry Gifford, Neil Roberts and Mark Wormald (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2013), pp. 117-193.
  • ‘The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly: Aquatic Insects and Metamorphosis in the works of Ted Hughes’ chapter in L. Talairach-Vielmas & M. Bouchet (eds). Spinning Webs of Wonder: Insects and Texts. (Brussels: Peter Laing, 2013). In press.

Poetry:

  • LandForms  (Orkney: Seapressed, 2012).
  • Co-editor (with George Ttoouli) and contributor to The Anthology of the Apple (Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2013). An interdisciplinary collection of poetry, poetry translations and critical essays. In print.
  • ‘Landfall at Tarrafal’, Under the Radar issue 12, December 2013, p. 42. (Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2013). In print.
  • ‘Poem for Eva’, ‘Blae’ and ‘Girton Orchard’. Forthcoming in The Clearing. Accepted.
  • ‘Climbing the Outcrop’ in The Clearing, April 2014. In print.
  • ‘Palimpsest’, Versekraken Issue 2, April 2014. In print.
  • ‘A Voice’ (translation of Yves Bonnefoy) The Ofi Press issue 35. In print.
  • ‘Devil’s Thunderbolt’, ‘Lyric Cicada,’ ‘Deerhart’ ‘In Ovo’, ‘How It Feels’, ‘Hide.’.
  • InterdisciplinaryStudies in Literature and the Environment 22.2 (Winter 2015) 1-5. In print.
  • Deerhart (pamphlet) forthcoming from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press in January 2016.
  • The Apple Anthology. Reddick, Yvonne and George Ttoouli, eds and contributors. Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2013.
  • LandForms (pamphlet). Orkney: Seapressed, 2012.

Africa's river environments