Anthony Carrigan | University of Leeds (original) (raw)

I'm a Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures at the University of Leeds, and my research focuses on issues of globalization, economic development, and environmental change. My book Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (Routledge, 2011) examines writings from the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Sri Lanka in relation to interdisciplinary tourism studies, showing how imaginative texts provide strategies for negotiating exploitative travel practices.

My current research project, Representing Postcolonial Disaster: Conflict, Consumption, Reconstruction, addresses the social and environmental dimensions of a number of post-WWII catastrophes, exploring how postcolonial aesthetics can contribute to revising mainstream disaster studies concepts such as vulnerability, resilience, and recovery. This has been supported by a Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU, Munich (2012) and by an AHRC Early Career Fellowship (2013–15).

I'm also PI for an AHRC-NWO Research Network in collaboration with colleagues at Leiden and Amsterdam, focusing on colonial and postcolonial disasters in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia (1800–present). The network involves sustained inter-empire comparison, and explores how the mediation of disastrous experiences impacts on past, present, and future understandings of community cohesion and sustainability in island contexts (http://representingcatastrophe.com/).

All my work engages with a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and builds on the exciting research taking place at the intersection between postcolonialism, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

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