Dr Rebecca Macklin

Biography

I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Leeds, which I gained in 2020. From 2017-18 I was a Fulbright Researcher at Cornell University and from 2020-21 I was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, at the University of Pennsylvania. I am currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2021-2024), and came to Aberdeen in 2023 from the University of Edinburgh. In October 2024, I will take up the post Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in Social Inclusion and Cultural Diversity at the University of Aberdeen.

My work sits at the intersection between Indigenous studies and the environmental humanities. I am interested in the radical potential of literature, media, and cultural texts and the roles they play in decolonial and environmental justice movements - particularly in relation to the United States, Canada, and South Africa. My forthcoming monograph Unsettling Fictions: Relationality and Resistance in Native American and South African Literatures explores the resonances between Indigenous and Black anti-colonial literary traditions in the US and South Africa. I have published related research in edited volumes and journals including Interventions, ARIEL, and Transatlantica.

My current Leverhulme project, Entwined Futures: Indigeneity, Gender, and Resource Extraction, explores how Indigenous creators are navigating the pressures of resource extraction and environmental degradation on their territories, with a particular emphasis on how artistic and cultural texts imagine alternative ethics and relations beyond colonial logics.

I also have begun to develop new interdisciplinary research to better understand how the arts and humanities can facilitate the co-creation of research with communities around questions of energy production, access, and transition. In 2022, I co-founded the Intersecting Energy Cultures Working Group with Professor Bethany Wiggin (University of Pennsylvania) to explore these questions.

Research Overview

Indigenous studies, Native American literature, world literature, environmental justice, environmental humanities, South African literature, postcolonial studies, decolonial theory, gender and sexuality.

Current Research

Co-founder of the Intersecting Energy Cultures Working Group

Funding and Grants

British Academy and Wellcome Trust Conferences Scheme (2023): Resisting Toxic Climates: Gender, Colonialism and Environment

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2021-24): Entwined Futures: Indigeneity, Gender, and the Extractive Industries

UK-US Fulbright Commission, Visiting Researcher (2017-18): Cornell University, affiliated with the Department of English and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program