Xausa News

August 2026 · Visiting Scholar at Cornell University

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 09:24:38 GMT

In August 2026, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. During my stay, I had the opportunity to meet with Caroline Levine and to work on the development of my ERC Starting Grant project. The visit offered valuable time to refine the project’s theoretical framework and discuss its broader directions in relation to New Formalism and the study of political forms.

June 2026 · Paper at the 41st Narrative Conference

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:34:08 GMT

At the 2026 Narrative Conference at Aarhus University, I co-organized the panel “Form, Narrative, Nature: Refiguring Queer Ecologies” with Erin James (University of Idaho) and Gabriele D’Amato (Ghent University). The panel brought together work at the intersection of narrative theory, queer ecologies, and environmental humanities, and laid the groundwork for a special issue that we are currently co-editing.

April 2026 · Scholar of the Month at ASLE

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:16:54 GMT

In April 2026 I was named Scholar of the Month by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). In the interview published on the ASLE website I talk about how I came to ecocriticism, the writers and artists who shape my thinking, and the project I am working on now.

My path into the environmental humanities began in 2018, during graduate work in gender studies at Utrecht University. Feminist, queer and decolonial theory pushed me toward ecological questions, and the environmental humanities offered a space that brought together my interests in postcolonial literatures and gender studies.

Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist works remain foundational for me. I often return to Wanuri Kahiu's film Pumzi, which locates resistance in the capacity to imagine otherwise, and I read widely among artists and writers such as Wangechi Mutu, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin and Octavia E. Butler.

My current research approaches eco-anxiety as a socially and politically structured affect, shaped by narrative form. I ask how literary narratives mediate climate-related emotions across tensions between individual experience and collective responsibility, despair and hope, present crises and future possibilities. This work is part of SHIFT-GEN, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project I lead with colleagues at the University of Idaho, Ghent University and the University of Bologna.

Read the full interview on the ASLE website.