Author: kirkbsides

Kirk B. Sides is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow whose research focuses on race, the environment and climate change in the literatures of Africa and its Diaspora. His work is interested in questions of the early formation of African literature in the twentieth century, as well as the long history of ecological thinking and environmental writing from Africa and the Diaspora. He is currently finishing a book project that looks at representations of race, climate crisis and environmental apocalypse in African literature and film. A second project on 'global apartheid' traces an intellectual history of South African apartheid, and maps its transcolonial origins in German anthropology and Jim Crow Segregation policies. He is also doing research on the history of migration and incarceration in the Indian Ocean world, and as a way to think about postcolonial histories of the Global South.

Welcome

by kirkbsides

I am a Lecturer in World Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol, U.K. I work on African literature and the environment, focusing on histories of ecological thinking, and how climate change is currently being imagined in African writing and film. I Direct a University-wide interdisciplinary unit for the Bristol Futures Program, titled “City Futures”. The course uses decolonial methodologies and various forms of community engagement to think about issues of migration, citizenship, and planetary change affecting the city of Bristol. I also Direct a course on “Decolonizing Literature” and convene a ‘Decolonial Reading Group’ for Faculty in the Department of English at Bristol. Before my current post, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Johannesburg, South Africa and worked at the University of the Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, I live and work Bristol, U.K., and continue to write and research in Johannesburg and Gaborone, Botswana.

In early spring of 2021, I will be in residence as a “Futures” Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. While there I will be completing my manuscript titled African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures. 

Contact me at: kirkbsides@gmail.com