Nicola Hamer

Thesis title:

Beyond elegy: confronting grief in contemporary ecopoetry

My thesis explores the ways in which ecological grief – the grief felt in response to environmental losses such as extinction or deforestation, often wrought by colonialism – is confronted in contemporary poetry from North America and the Caribbean.

Research Area

Languages and Literature

Conferences

'Beyond Elegy, or, Towards a Poetics of Ecological Grief'
Ecological Grief and Mourning in the Literature and the Arts in the Anglophone World - Université Paris Cité, Paris, France (2025)

'Reading Ecological Grief in Caribbean "Scarscape"'
University of the West Indies and University of Leicester International Summer School Student Conference - University of the West Indies, St Augstine Campus, Trinidad (2024)

'"A Tortured Sense of Time": The Nonlinear Temporalities of Ecological Grief'
Society for Caribbean Studies UK Postgraduate Conference - University of Warwick (2024)

'Reading Ecopoetics in Divine Disasters'

Divine Disasters - University of Warwick (2024)

Invited Workshop with Ambika Raja and Lizzie Smith

'Kamau Brathwaite's "Scarscape" and Ecopoetic Mourning'
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) Biennial Conference - Portland, Oregan (2023)

'These Veins that Run like Rivers': Colonialism and Ecological Grief'
Territorial Bodies: World Culture in Crisis - University of Warwick (2023)

'Ecopoetic Mourning and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill'
English: Shared Futures - University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and University of Salford (2022)

Public Engagement & Impact

Creative Writing Masterclass for Transformations Prizewinners (2023)

Writing the Future: Creative Writing and Climate Change - classes for the schools outreach programme FABFest (2023)

Lecture on Poetry and Seamus Heaney at Bluecoats School Sixth Form College (2023)

Other Research Interests

Environmental Humanities

Ecocriticism

Environmental Philosophy

Postcolonial Studies

Caribbean Studies

World Literatures

Poetry and Poetics

Memberships

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

Teaching

Modes of Reading (Undergraduate Module - Literary Theory)

Critical Environments (Postgraduate Module - Environmental Humanities)

Additional Academic Activities

In 2023-24, I founded and convened the reading group for the University of Warwick's Centre for Ecopoetics.

I have organised Q&A events featuring Dr Craig Santos Perez (in 2024) and Allison Cobb (in 2023).

I have organised a reading and workshop with poet Cathi Rae, entitled 'Giving Voice: The Arts and Ethics of Telling Other People's Stories' (2024).