Introduction

This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.

Malcolm Sen

Dr. Malcolm Sen is an Irish Research Council Fellow at the Center for the Environment at Harvard University where he is writing a book on Environmental Narratives, Climate Change and Sovereignty. His research includes South Asian and Irish literatures, postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. He is especially interested in the conceptual pathways through which literary and cultural analysis can play a more dominant role in environmental debates, the role of narrative in our understanding of and responses to unraveling climate change effects, and the necessity of re-imagining sovereignty in the twenty-first century. His essays on topics such as orientalism, postcolonial modernities, memory studies and environmental narratives have been published in a number of journals and books. He also recently wrote a research document on Indian and West African cotton production for a European Union project aimed to raise awareness about Fairtrade certified products at the public procurement level. Malcolm has been a regular broadcaster on Irish radio and has written for The Irish Times and History Ireland among other popular publications. Malcolm has taught English, Irish and World literatures, and Postcolonial Studies in a number of universities (Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the National University of Ireland Maynooth, the National University of Ireland Galway and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana). His awards include the Humanities Institute of Ireland Research Scholarship (2002-2006), the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2011), the Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship (2014) and the current Elevate (Marie-Curie co-fund) Fellowship through the Irish Research Council (2014). He will shortly be taking up an assistant professorship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.