ProfessorJohn Brannigan

I'm a literary and cultural historian, with particular interests in twentieth-century Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh literatures, and especially in how literature relates to history, geography, social and cultural identities, and environmental change. For me, literature is a primary resource for exploring problems of representation, such as how we make narratives of difficult and traumatic historical experiences, and how we construct social identities (such as race, gender, class, nation, or sexuality) to distinguish groups of people. Literature has very particular and complex relationships with such problems, as an imaginative, formal mode of representation. My research has analysed archipelagic and maritime conceptions of the islands collectively and historically (although problematically) called 'the British Isles'. In the twentieth century, I believe, many Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh writers sought to re-imagine the relationships between the peoples of these islands, and much of their work has been pre-occupied with the material and symbolic meanings of islandness, borders, and coastlines. In recent work, I have focused on interdisciplinary approaches to cultural ecosystem assessment, using methodologies from the environmental humanities to understand and assess the cultural impacts of climate change and environmental change in coastal and marine areas.