We are delighted to welcome Dr Pippa Marland, who joins us from the University of Leeds as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow on 1 November 2020. Her project, ‘The Pen and the Plough’, looks at the representation of farming in British nature writing from the early twentieth century to the UK’s departure from the Common Agricultural Policy post-Brexit, mapping a developing ‘new georgic’ in contemporary wilder farming initiatives. After many years as a musician, Pippa won a PhD scholarship in Ecocriticism at the University of Worcester. She is completing a monograph based on her thesis – Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago – in Rowman and Littlefield’s Rethinking the Island Series.

As Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded ‘Land Lines’ project at the University of Leeds, Pippa has co-authored Land Lines: Modern British Nature Writing, an account of the development of the nature writing genre from Gilbert White and Charlotte Smith to the present (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is currently Co-I of the AHRC-funded follow-on project ‘Tipping Points: Cultural Responses to Wilding in the North of England’ working with Castle Howard, the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Wild Ennerdale.

Pippa has published widely on ecocriticism, eco-poetry and nature writing, and her co-edited collection Walking, Landscape and Environment was published in 2019. Her creative writing has featured in The Clearing, Women on Nature, and Earthlines and she is co-editor with Anita Roy of a diverse collection of original nature writing, Gifts of Gravity and Light (Hodder and Stoughton, 2021). She has already collaborated with Bristol’s Environmental Humanities Research Centre, and is very happy to be re-joining the Department of English, where she studied for her BA (1983-1986).