Isabel Galleymore

My research focuses on contemporary literature and ecocriticism and the recent popularity in ‘place writing’ forms a crucial chapter in my monograph Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Here, I explore the recent phenomenon of the environmental writing course (a specialized form of the creative writing course) offered at UK and US universities, which, in many, if not all, cases, includes an element of place-based pedagogy. Indeed, it is now possible for students to undertake an MA dedicated to ‘Place Writing’ at several institutions including Manchester Metropolitan University. My research investigates the influences behind this pedagogy: the canon of environmental literature, which includes David Henry Thoreau’s Walden; the recent boom of British ‘new nature writing’ first articulated by Jason Cowley; and the history of place-based education that arose with the environmental movement in the 1960s. My investigation looks at how university courses today frequently aim to foster in their students’ writing a reverent approach to local place, and I compare this to contemporary ecocritical perspectives that often critique such an approach. Ursula Heise’s influential argument in Sense of Place, Sense of Planet (2008) articulates the necessary challenge of engaging globally. Drawing on her theory of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ and Juliana Spahr’s poetics of communality, I suggest ways of developing current pedagogical emphasis on intimate connections with local environments by cultivating awareness of place in the context of global ecological relations.