By Kate Huber. University of Virginia Press, 2026.

Ireland was Britain’s first colony and its first imperial laboratory—the place where many colonial methods were tested before being exported to the farther-flung portions of the empire. In Irish Ecomedia, Katherine M. Huber examines the environmental impacts of imperial rule and the various ways they have been expressed and rearticulated over time. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism, ecomedia studies, and other avant-garde critical methods, Huber considers multiple media at distinct moments of modernization in Ireland and shows how artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers have challenged dominant narratives of development. Through photography, literature, film, radio, and music, this book reveals alternatives to colonial practices of enclosure and extraction that sacrifice peoples and places in the name of progress. The media, cultural, and environmental resources upon which Irish people and communities have drawn to assert agency bear witness to existent postcolonial modernities that promise more socially and environmentally just futures.

This book was greatly supported by the ASLE 2024 Subvention Grant.

Katherine Huber is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University. She specializes in multimedia cultural analysis, postcolonial ecocriticism, ecomedia studies, and transnational environmental justice, with a focus on anglophone and Dutch literatures and cultures. Irish Ecomedia: Empire and Environmental Justice in the Modernization of Postcolonial Ireland is Kate’s first book. Building on this book’s exploration of connections between colonialism and the environment, Kate is currently working on a new project that explores the interconnections among migration, media, and environment. Learn more about Kate’s teaching, research, and public outreach work at www.katehuber.org.