I work on nineteenth-century ecology, literature and science.
My current project, Empire of the Sun: Imagining Solar Energy in Colonial India, 1878-1915, examines how British engineers, literary authors, and the greater English-language newspapers from colonial India imagined solar energy as an imperial infrastructure. Proposing the term “solar imperialism” to describe this understudied geopolitical doctrine, the project aims to provide an imperial history of the current energy transition.
I am also working on the monograph Climate Control and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle. The book argues that a range of canonical fin de siècle-authors such as Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Mark Twain gave aesthetic form to the idea that humanity could affect global climate change. Paradoxically, they did this not through the scientific paradigm of global warming, but its perverse inverse: climate control. The book provides thus a literary history of anthropogenic climate.
I have published on some of these issues in journals such as Victorian Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment, Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Dix-Neuf.
I have experience in organizing, lecturing and grading courses on naturalism, New Imperialism and the New Woman, but also the "new" anthropogenic environments of the Victorian period: the underground, the atmosphere, and the planet. Foci has counted writers such as Émile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M. P. Shiel and Helga Johansen.
