Research Project
I am currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in creative writing at James Cook University on how ecological emotions - such as homesickness, solastalgia and eco-anxiety - manifest in life writing. My main research question is: how is the climate crisis influencing the way we tell our personal stories? My research includes field writing, archival weather diaries, women’s contemporary creative nonfiction and scientific research to explore new ways of writing about the environment.
In 2022, I was awarded the William Thomas Williams Postgraduate Scholarship for a creative scholar.
I am currently writing a collection of eco-autobiographical essays entitled Somehow North. These essays travel to vulnerable landscapes - a melting glacier in New Zealand, an artificially-induced drought in the Daintree Rainforest, a coral reef post a mass bleaching event - to answer urgent questions about our shared climate and cultural future.
Scholarly publications
The Colour of Water: mapping emotional waterways in creative life writing, Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, Routledge. Forthcoming 2024.
“A story with many rooms": Twine as a tool to explore life writing about place and space, TEXT Special Edition 69: Digital Realism, 2022.
The weather up here, The Incompleteness Book II, Australian Association of Writing Programs, 2021.
Research Assistant
Labs/ Research Groups
The Life Narrative Lab, Flinders University
The Blue Humanities Lab, James Cook University
Un/earthing Feelings, Association for the Study of Literature, Environment & Culture ANZ
Gender and Culture Research Group, James Cook University
Conference papers
Memory and Place: Bridging divides in eco-autobiographical life writing, Fragmented Lives: International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide, University of Iceland 2024
Weather-watching as eco-autobiographical practice, International Auto/biography Association Asia-Pacific, Online 2023
‘On Ice’: Eco-autobiography as a mode to communicate climate change affects, Environmental Communication: Science Inspired and Arts Delivered, The Cairns Institute, 2023
Homesickness, solastalgia and eco-anxiety through affective ecocriticism and life writing, Recentring the Region: Association for the Study of Australian Literature & Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, 2023.
Personal Weather: a practice-led research approach to writing the ‘stimmung’ of a place, Nature Feelz: Perspectives and reflections on ecological emotions, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney 2022
“A story with many rooms”: Twine as a tool to explore life writing about place and space, The Life Narrative Lab, Flinders University 2022
Academic qualifications
PhD cadidate, James Cook University 2021-2024
Master of Art (Arts Management) with Distinction, RMIT University 2018
Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing) with Distinction, RMIT University 2016
Global mobility program: experimental writing, Concordia University Montreal 2016
Global mobility program: summer semester fiction writing, The American University of Paris 2015