DrTreasa De Loughry

All of my projects probe how the stories we tell about the environment, whether on the page or out in the world, are bound up with the material and discursive legacies of colonialism, the unequal politics of our current moment, and culture's capacity to imagine a just future.

My first book, The Global Novel and Capitalism-in-Crisis: Contemporary Literary Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), examined the mediation of global crises in contemporary works by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta and Rachel Kushner. It argued for a critical shift from postcolonial to world-systemic literary studies in light of the emergence of planetary and compound crises, and examined how this manifests in the form and content of expansive globe-hopping novels.

I am currently writing my second book on discard studies and pollution in world literature. It examines how culture grapples with the entropic impact of waste-capitalism as a form of racialised toxic colonialism that impacts the plantations, waste-sites, and precarious workers of the world's peripheries - focusing on hotspots of pollution in the Caribbean and South Asia. 

I recently finished co-editing The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and Environment with Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff and Claire Westall (2026). Weaving together eco‑materialist approaches to the aesthetic registration of humanity‑in‑nature, the environmental history of capitalism and world‑literary methods of comparativism, this Companion acts as a large‑scale guide for new readers and researchers interested in postcolonial studies, global or world‑literature, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. 

I also conduct interdisciplinary and community-facing projects - I am co-leading the Irish Energy Narratives in the Transition (IENARR) project, funded by the Earth Institute, on community understandings and narratives of energy transitions. We recently ran community workshops at key sites of energy transition in Ireland. https://www.ucd.ie/earth/ie-narr/ .

I am an experienced reviewer and welcome review requests based on my areas of expertise.

My recent publications include:

  The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment. Edited by Treasa De Loughry, Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff, and Claire Westall (Routledge. 2026).

 “Waste Frontiers and Revolutionary Entropy in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (2013) and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019).” In. The Routledge Companion to World-Literature and the Environment (Routledge. 2026).

 “Theorizing Global Realism from Lukács to Climate Crisis Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms. Eds. Margarita Vaysman & Katherine Bowers (Oxford University Press, 2025). 

 “Unruly Magic: Global Resource Extraction, Witchcraft, and Resistance in Yaba Badoe’s The Witches of Gambaga (2011) and Wolf Light (2019).” Feminist Theory Special Issue: Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture 25.2 (2024): 175-186. 

My broader research and teaching interests include: post-1970s world and postcolonial literature; the global novel and global short stories; Marxist critical theory, world-literature, world-systems; postcolonial ecocriticism, ecomaterialism, world-ecology; the energy humanities and pollution; waste/ discard studies and literature.