Dr Anna Pilz of University College Cork and Dr Daniel Finch-Race of the University of Bristol will spend the Autumn semester as Environmental Humanities visiting fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

Anna Pilz specialises in nineteenth-century Irish literature and culture. She is co-editor of Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty (Manchester University Press, 2016). The IASH fellowship supports the writing of her first monograph, The Wooded Isle: Trees, Inheritance and Estates in Irish Writing. A fusion of literary and environmental history, this interdisciplinary project traces how trees and woodland served as a nexus for debates about inheritances, dispossession, and ownership by taking account of the complex questions and issues these literary representations raised: within the context of colonialism (via narratives of colonial extraction versus conservative environmental stewardship); the competing conceptualisation of arboreal landscapes that ensued (nationality, aesthetics, economics, class identity, conservationism); and the consequent politicization of sylvan culture and horticultural pursuits across genres.

Daniel Finch-Race, FHEA, worked at the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton, and Durham before joining the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. His primary research blends the environmental humanities with nineteenth-century French culture. He is the author of articles in French Studies Bulletin, Green Letters, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Modern Language Review, and Romance Studies. In 2018, he co-authored an article in L’Esprit créateur with Valentina Gosetti. He co-edited Textures (Peter Lang, 2015) with Jeff Barda, French Ecocriticism (Peter Lang, 2017) with Stephanie Posthumus, and issues of Dix-Neuf (‘Ecopoetics’, 2015) and L’Esprit créateur (‘French Ecocriticism’, 2017) with Julien Weber.