ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for March 2024 is Elizabeth Carolyn Miller.
Liz Miller is a Professor of English and Interim Chair of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature of Britain and the British Empire, ecocriticism and environmental studies, gender studies, and media studies. She is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton, 2021). Extraction Ecologies received the Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies as well as Honorable Mention for the ASLE Ecocriticism Book Award. It was also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year. In 2018, she also guest-edited a special issue of Victorian Studies on “Climate Change and Victorian Studies.”
How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?
I had been working as an English professor for about ten years before moving into this field, but I had a longstanding interest in environmentalism that, looking back, I suppose started with my parents’ involvement in the Small Is Beautiful movement during my childhood. Environmental topics started to become more central to my research through my work on William Morris, a nineteenth-century eco-socialist who was a poet, designer, and founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris was a central figure in my second book, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, and as I took a deeper dive into his political career during my research for that book, I became especially interested in his critique of the coal economy. Morris’s own family’s fortune came from shares in a Cornwall copper mine, and he divested himself of these shares around the time that he became a socialist. Eventually, this work on Morris led me to write a whole book on the literature of extraction and extractivism, 1830s-1930s. Only about ten pages of that book are about Morris, but his life and career are what brought me to the subject.
Who is your favorite environmental artist, writer, or filmmaker? Or what is your favorite environmental text?
I have too many to name, but I want first to say how much I loved Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), which is my favorite work of recent climate fiction and which I absolutely could not put down the first time I read it. I also want to mention Donna Barba Higuera’s children’s book The Last Cuentista (2021), which I just taught last week in my Children’s Literature class and which the students absolutely loved, as did my 12-year-old son. In the novel, which begins in the 2060s, a group of humans manage to escape Earth shortly before it is blown to bits by a comet, and they move to another planet that is capable of supporting human life. Much of the novel is about the environmental and social mistakes humans made in the past, and how they can avoid making those mistakes again while also retaining their connection to Earth and their past. The protagonist, 12-year-old Petra Peña, has had all of Earth’s stories downloaded to her brain as a resource for the future human civilization on a new planet, but not everyone who makes the journey believes the stories should be remembered. It’s a novel about how environmental knowledge and understanding are carried through stories, and the plot is very engaging for child readers and college students too. As a parent and as someone who regularly teaches Children’s Literature, I have a special interest in environmental literature for children and in the question of how to engage young readers in the problem of climate change. One of my favorite books along these lines is the picture book Town Is by the Sea (2017) by Joanne Schwartz, which is about the son of a coalminer in a Canadian mining village who knows that one day he’ll have to work in the mines too. It’s a sad and poignant reflection on the forms of social reproduction that have accompanied and supported the fossil fuel economy.
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a new project about the transformation of the nineteenth-century oceanic world with the rise of the coal economy. My working title at the moment is simply “The Industrial Ocean.” The project explores literary and periodical accounts of the industrialization of the ocean from roughly the 1830s to the 1930s, and it examines tensions between an older idea of an ocean impervious to human intervention and a newly emerging industrial ocean marked by coaling stations, steamship networks, undersea cables, and so forth. With George Hegarty, a graduate student at UC Davis who is also a member of ASLE, I co-wrote an article on Joseph Conrad that picks up on some of these concerns; it’s titled “‘The Stepping Stones of Empire’: Conrad, Coal, and Oceanic Infrastructure” and is forthcoming in a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on the topic of Infrastructure.
What is something you are reading right now that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
This quarter I was teaching Introduction to the Environmental Humanities, a core class for PhD students pursuing a Designated Emphasis in Environmental Humanities, and we just finished the class with Gabrielle Hecht’s new book Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, which came out in November 2023. Residual Governance focuses on South Africa’s mining industry and the enormous waste and toxicity it has left behind, as well as on the people who are fighting against the industry today. For my last book I had done quite a bit of research on the nineteenth-century origins of South Africa’s so-called Mineral Revolution, and it was sobering to read Hecht’s account of the colossal wastes and wastelanding of that industry as an expression of what she (following Charles Mills) calls “the racial contract.” Many of the racial features of the industry that emerged in the nineteenth century would later become formalized under apartheid. What is perhaps most inspiring to me about Hecht’s account, though, is the choices she makes as an author and historian. In the book’s introduction, she says that she will approach the mining industry “via those who called out its failings and sought to improve its terms, not via those who built and maintained its systems.” She looks at activists and artists engaged in the “hard-never-ending work of repair required to survive in Anthropocenic times.” In her conclusion, she determines that “resilience and hope are not abstract affective conditions. They’re work.” Although I am an ecocritic focusing on the past rather than a historian focused on the present, reading her work made me think more about how to foreground those engaged in the hard work of repair in my own future research and teaching.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you?
There are so many that it’s hard to know where to start, but I want to mention my colleague at Davis, Parama Roy, who retired last year and whose work focused on many ecocritical subjects, from food to animals, in Victorian literature and the literature of South Asia. For many years she occupied the office next door to me, and I benefited from regular doses of hallway banter and conversation with her. Parama is one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met and she has a brilliant and wry critical sensibility that I have always enjoyed. There are also many scholars of Victorian ecocriticism whose work I find inspiring, including Sukanya Banerjee, Siobhan Carroll, Allen MacDuffie, and Jesse Oak Taylor. My friend and colleague Margaret Ronda, who works on ecopoetics and contemporary poetry, has been an inspiration in her generosity and collegiality as well as her brilliance. Finally, I want to mention how inspired I am by the scholar-activists Caroline Levine and Barbara Leckie who are doing amazing work at their institutions and in the profession to fight climate change and to decrease academia’s dependence on fossil fuels. All of us who work in this field could benefit from their example. At UC Davis, I’ve been involved with a group called Fossil Free UCD, through which I’ve met like-minded colleagues in other departments who also want to push for change. If we had groups like this at every university we could achieve a great deal.
