Paul Cockburn

Biography	My thesis is titled ‘Concrete Jungle: Imagining Nature in the Literature of New York City’. I began my PhD in 2019 with AHRC funding from the Northern Bridge Consortium. In 2022, I was a British Research Council Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., funded through an additional award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. My project considers New York City as an environment which allows for evolving conceptions of nature and the natural to be interrogated through literary representation. This project has a necessarily ambitious scope, ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In my first chapter, I perform an historically informed exegesis of the collocation ‘Concrete-Jungle’ (which has become synonymous with New York). My second chapter explores the category of ‘weed’ as outlaw, excrescence, and revolutionary in the horticultural metaphor of writers from Edith Wharton to Audre Lorde. In my third chapter, I track a tiger through the streets of the five boroughs over nearly two centuries of archival material, paying attention to literary representations of the city’s many vermin, vagrants, and visitors. And my final chapter reads the way in which climate management and adaptation is imagined in speculative fiction of the city from 1890 to 2020, incorporating insights into the material consequences of post-1971 financialization in the context of our warming world. My research interests are interdisciplinary, situated in the fields of cultural theory, philosophy, environmental humanities, and literary studies. My current project draws on ecocriticism, actor–network theory, speculative realism, phenomenology, visual arts, architecture, and Martin Heidegger’s reading of Greek metaphysics. I have taught in the Department of English Studies at Durham on both 'Introduction to the Novel' and 'Introduction to Poetry'. I have professional experience in bookselling and academic publishing. I welcome any inquiries. CONFERENCES and LECTURES ‘New York on the Loose’, at Kluge Centre, Library of Congress, 20 June 2023. “all the strange weeds”: Cultivation, Nativism, and Revolution in Edith Wharton's New York’, at New Work in Modernist Studies 11, organised by British Association for Modernist Studies, online, 10 December 2021. ‘The Tiger Who Came to Manhattan: Reading 'Nature' in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City’, at Late Summer Lecture Series 2021, Durham University, 29 September 2021. ‘Nature and Agency in the Creative Literature of New York City’, at Cities in a Changing World: Questions of Culture, Climate and Design, organised by AMPS, City Tech, City University of New York (and online), 16-18 June 2021. FUNDING and AWARDS Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Award (AHRC) 19-23. British Research Council Fellow at Library of Congress (AHRC) 2022. ROLES Convener, Inventions of the Text seminar series, Department of English Studies, Durham University (20-21).
Teaching and Learning	Introduction to Poetry (ENGL1071). Introduction to the Novel (ENGL1071).

Biography

My thesis is titled ‘Concrete Jungle: Imagining Nature in the Literature of New York City’.

I began my PhD in 2019 with AHRC funding from the Northern Bridge Consortium. In 2022, I was a British Research Council Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., funded through an additional award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

My project considers New York City as an environment which allows for evolving conceptions of nature and the natural to be interrogated through literary representation. This project has a necessarily ambitious scope, ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In my first chapter, I perform an historically informed exegesis of the collocation ‘Concrete-Jungle’ (which has become synonymous with New York). My second chapter explores the category of ‘weed’ as outlaw, excrescence, and revolutionary in the horticultural metaphor of writers from Edith Wharton to Audre Lorde. In my third chapter, I track a tiger through the streets of the five boroughs over nearly two centuries of archival material, paying attention to literary representations of the city’s many vermin, vagrants, and visitors. And my final chapter reads the way in which climate management and adaptation is imagined in speculative fiction of the city from 1890 to 2020, incorporating insights into the material consequences of post-1971 financialization in the context of our warming world.

My research interests are interdisciplinary, situated in the fields of cultural theory, philosophy, environmental humanities, and literary studies. My current project draws on ecocriticism, actor–network theory, speculative realism, phenomenology, visual arts, architecture, and Martin Heidegger’s reading of Greek metaphysics.

I have taught in the Department of English Studies at Durham on both 'Introduction to the Novel' and 'Introduction to Poetry'.

I have professional experience in bookselling and academic publishing.

I welcome any inquiries.

CONFERENCES and LECTURES

‘New York on the Loose’, at Kluge Centre, Library of Congress, 20 June 2023.

“all the strange weeds”: Cultivation, Nativism, and Revolution in Edith Wharton's New York’, at New Work in Modernist Studies 11, organised by British Association for Modernist Studies, online, 10 December 2021.

‘The Tiger Who Came to Manhattan: Reading 'Nature' in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City’, at Late Summer Lecture Series 2021, Durham University, 29 September 2021.

‘Nature and Agency in the Creative Literature of New York City’, at Cities in a Changing World: Questions of Culture, Climate and Design, organised by AMPS, City Tech, City University of New York (and online), 16-18 June 2021.

FUNDING and AWARDS

Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Award (AHRC) 19-23.
British Research Council Fellow at Library of Congress (AHRC) 2022.

ROLES

Convener, Inventions of the Text seminar series, Department of English Studies, Durham University (20-21).

Teaching and Learning

Introduction to Poetry (ENGL1071).
Introduction to the Novel (ENGL1071).