Nick Foxton is lecturer at Kingston University where he teaches a final year special study in ‘Environment and Literature’. With a background that spans anthropology, literary theory, environmental philosophy, Buddhism and American poetry, Nick has also worked as a trekking and mountain guide, and combines his academic work with a career as a wildlife photographer. He is currently working on a conservation and photographic project in the Peruvian Amazon (One Tree in a Billion). Nick will co-organise the ‘Encountering’ events.
Lucy Mercer is studying for an AHRC funded PhD in 'speculative emblematics', in which Renaissance emblems are examined through the lens of contemporary ecocritical philosophies as well as visual art. She is a contributor to the reader Ecocriticism, Ecology and the Cultures of Antiquity (Lexington Books, 2016) and is a poet, publishing widely in magazines. Lucy will co-organise the ‘Writing’ events and contribute to the administration of the project.
Flora Parrott is a TECHNE funded PhD student with supervision from the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University London and the Printmaking Department at The Royal College of Art. The research is centered around embodied experience of the subterranean with a particular focus on natural cave networks. Flora makes sculpture and installation and has exhibited in the UK and Internationally, including shows at Wysing Arts Centre, Atelier Fidalga, Brazil, The Bluecoat and Tintype London. In 2016 Parrott was the Artist In Residence at RGS-IBG developing a project about caves and caving titled Swallet. A publication of the same name has been designed and published with Camberwell Press.
Adeline Johns-Putra is an ecocritic with a particular interest in climate change fiction. She has published several articles and edited a special issue of the journal Symploke on this topic, with a monograph forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has also given keynotes and public lectures in the UK, North America and Sweden. She was Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE UKI) from 2011 to 2015, and has experience with organising ASLE UKI conferences and workshops for writing practitioners and scholars. Adeline will co-organise the ‘Writing’ events.
Danielle Sands has published widely across animal studies, environmental ethics and the Anthropocene and is particularly interested in generating a dialogues between philosophical aesthetics, critical theory and literary studies. Her monograph, Animals, Plants, Things: Nonhuman Storytelling between Philosophy and Literature is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. She has considerable experience organising academic and public engagement events as Fellow at the Forum for European Philosophy at LSE, where she organises and chairs ten events a year. Danielle will oversee the project and co-organise the ‘Thinking’ events.
Sara Upstone has a particular interest in ecocritical theory and has written in her most recent monograph Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction on the ‘utopian ecologies’ of contemporary writing, examining the relationship between ecocriticism and post-human politics. She teaches a postgraduate module at Kingston on ‘Humans and Animals’ and previously organised the one day symposium ‘Being Beyond Boundaries: Dissolving (species) Hierarchy in Contemporary Culture’ at Kingston University. Sara will co-organise the ‘Encountering’ events.
Daniel Whistler researches philosophies of nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their relevance to contemporary theory: he edited a special issue of Angelaki on Nature, Speculation and the Return to Schelling and has written many articles at the interface of philosophy of nature and aesthetics. He has long been interested in bringing philosophical and scientific reflection into art spaces, running a series of ‘Philosophy in the Gallery’ events at Tate galleries, co-curating an exhibition on artistic responses to medical trauma, Phantom Limb, at the Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool, and now working on an Arts-Lab model to reflect on speculative philosophies of nature. Dan will co-organise the ‘Thinking’ events.
Libby Worth has had extensive experience of working on site based performance through her original training with the renowned choreographer Anna Halprin through to current performance making and PhD supervision. She was part of site specific performance companies prior to her academic career and has consistently retained strong links with site work within her practice. Most recently she made a dancefilm on the roof of a canal boat moving through the Avon and Kennet Canal. She has written on dance improvisation and its relationship to everyday adaptability and change. Libby is organising the ‘Performing’ events.