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David Farrier

Senior Lecturer

Biography

Background

David Farrier studied at the University of Leeds (BA, MA, PhD). Before being appointed at Edinburgh in 2010, he was Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature for four years at the University of Leicester (where he was awarded a University Teaching Award in 2008). In 2017 he held a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship at the University of New South Wales.

Research summary

David's most recent books consider the new reality of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minnesota Press, 2019) is a study of contemporary environmental poetry, and Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (4th Estate/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), written for a general readership, explores what traces of present societies will persist in the deep future. Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature's Giles St Aubyn award for unpublished  non-fiction in 2017. David is particularly interested in how literature, especially poetry, responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

David is also the author of Postcolonial Asylum (Liverpool University Press, 2011), and Unsettled Narratives (Routledge, 2007), and has published widely in the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies.

Project activity

David convenes the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network and is a co-investigator on the multi-disciplinary AHRC-funded project 'Caring for the Future Through Ancestral Time'.

In 2012-13 he was part of a Creative Scotland funded project, Making it Home, which used poetry-based film-making to build bridges of shared experience, dialogue and integration between two diverse groups of women in Scotland: women who are refugees, supported by the Maryhill Integration Network in Glasgow; and local women from Women Supporting Women in Pilton, Edinburgh.

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