Dr Rebecca Macklin

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Background

Rebecca Macklin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research project examines literary and cultural engagements with gender, indigeneity and the extractive industries. Prior to coming to Edinburgh, Rebecca completed a PhD at the University of Leeds and from 2020-2021 was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, University of Pennsylvania. In 2017-2018, she received a Fulbright award to spend a year as a VIsiting Resercher at Cornell University with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program.

She has published work in ariel, Interventions, Wasafari, Native American and Indigenous Studies and The British Journal of Canadian Studies, and in 2019 co-edited a special issue of Transmotion. She is presently writing a book manuscript based on her PhD, entitled Unsettling Fictions: Relationality and Resistance in Native American and South African Literatures.

Qualifications

BA, English Literature, Lancaster University

MA, English Literature, University of Leeds

PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Leeds

Research summary

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

Current research interests

My current project is entitled Entwined Futures: Global Narratives of Indigeneity, Gender Violence and the Extractive Industries and examines cultural responses to extractive colonialism. In sites of resource extraction around the world, from the Alberta tar sands to the Niger Delta, gender violence occurs concomitantly with the destruction of non-human environments. How do literature, film and other cultural narrative forms register the connections between these types of violence? Comparatively examining contemporary texts from global contexts including North America, Latin America, the Marshall Islands and Australia, this project will theorise how histories of colonialism and the global extractive economy intersect to produce these entwined forms of violence. The study focuses on a range of landscapes and industries through its emphasis on cultural representations of specific materials, including oil, uranium, gold, and copper. I will develop an original, comparative methodology to analyse contemporary cultural texts, ranging across literary fiction, poetry, film and new media. In doing so, I will determine how an engagement with Indigenous narratives and worldviews can enable the re- imagining of more equitable futures.

Project activity

Leverhulme project outline: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/early-career-fellowships/entwined-futures-indigeneity-gender-violence-and-extractive-industries

Current project grants

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, University of Edinburgh (2021-2024)

Past project grants

Fulbright All Disciplines Postgraduate Award, Cornell University (2017-2018)

 Ecocriticism, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, August 2022.

Natural Violence, Unnatural Bodies: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Human in MMIWG Narratives, Interventions, 23:8, 1089-1105, 2021. DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2020.1816848

Unsettling Fictions: Relationality as Decolonial Method in Native American and South African Literatures, ariel, 51.2-3, 2020.