Professor Samantha Walton

Personal statement

My research brings together the environmental humanities and health humanities, with particular interest in ecocriticism and the politics and history of ‘wellbeing’. I am the director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities. As a literature scholar, I specialise in modern and contemporary British literature, with a focus on psychology and environmentalism; experimental poetics, fiction of the 1920s and 1930s; and the Scottish novelist and nature writer, Nan Shepherd. I co-edit the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism and will become President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE UKI) in 2023. I also write poetry, prose and creative non-fiction, and regularly speak at literary festivals, cultural venues and in the media about my research and writing.

My most recent book, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure, was published by Bloomsbury UK as a trade non-fiction title in 2021, and in French, Spanish and Italian translation in 2022. A blend of nature writing, cultural history, science and polemic, it tells a long and cross-cultural history of the ‘nature-wellbeing’ connection, investigating the science and cultural backdrop to this relationship and reflecting on how mental health is entangled with ecological and economic crisis under late capitalism. In its earliest stages, this work was supported by an Early Career Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I was also grateful to receive a Carson Writing Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Centre, LMU to focus on my manuscript between December 2018 and May 2019. I have spoken about this book at literary festivals, bookshops and on podcasts, including BBC Green Thinking, Lighthouse Books, and Tender Buttons.

In 2020, I published my second book, The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (Bloomsbury). The first book to examine Shepherd's writing through an ecocritical lens, it proposes that Shepherd's ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of the multi-disciplinary environmental humanities, and may inform their future development. This work was supported by a Postdoctoral and then an Environmental Humanities research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and a Visiting Scholarship in the Special Collections Centre at the University of Aberdeen, exploring Nan Shepherd’s letters and editorial archive. I have spoken about Nan Shepherd’s writing at mountain festivals in Kendal and Braemar, on BBC Winterwatch, at academic conferences and university reading series and at public arts and science cross-over events like super/collider.

In my first monograph, Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2015), I examined detective writing in the context of psychological innovation, legal debates and literary modernism. I’ve also published articles and book chapters on ecological crime fiction, Anthropocene feminism, ecorecovery memoir, war trauma and ecology, and the literature of women walking.

My research into environment crisis blends critical and creative approaches. In 2015, I received a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for the project ‘Landscaping Change: exploring environmental regeneration and conservation using arts and humanities research methods.’ The funding supported events at the Arnolfini and Hamilton House in Bristol, exploring issues including soil degradation, water relations, sustainable transport and urban ecology from artistic, poetic, activist, and academic perspectives. In March 2016, the Landscaping Change conference facilitated interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration, featuring delegates from academic fields of literature, history, geography, theology, heritage, social science and anthropology; creative practitioners of art, theatre, poetry and digital writing; arts activists and environmental campaign groups. These events sparked exciting new collaborations, including an ecopoetic sound poem written inspired by the Bath-Bristol Railway Path, co-produced with acoustic geographer Jonathan Prior, and a poetry and practice-based collaboration with environmental artist and researcher, Sage Brice.

As a poet, I’m interested in avant garde and experimental writing. I published my debut collection Self Heal in 2018 (Boiler House Press), and my ecogothic pamphlet Bad Moon in 2020 (Spam Press). I co-run Sad Press, which specialises in pamphlets, translations and anthologies of new writing.

I currently supervise doctoral research on: poetry mentoring, experimental queer poetry, mountain literature, working class ecocriticism and literature of extinction. I am always interested in hearing from prospective PhD students hoping to work in any of the fields outlined above, and also:
• Experimental ecopoetry
• Modernist and ‘middlebrow’ women writers of the early 20th century, especially Scottish authors
• Mental illness and wellbeing in literature
• Crime fiction, especially of the Golden Age
• Health and environmental humanities cross-over projects
• Nature writing

Academic qualifications

• PhD University of Edinburgh
• MSc Birkbeck, University of London
• BA (Hons) King's College London.

Professional qualifications

• Certificate in Professional Learning in Higher Education, Bath Spa University 2016.

Professional memberships

• Co-editor, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, the journal of ASLE-UK
• ASLE UKI - Member and from 2023, President.

Areas of expertise

• Writing and the environment
• Landscape in literature
• Crime fiction
• Interwar modernisms
• Scottish women writers
• Psychology and literature
• Innovative poetry, 20th and 21st century.

Current and previous modules at Bath Spa

MA in Environmental Humanities
• Environmental Writing and Ecocriticism (co-teaching)

BA in English Literature
• Literature and Psychology (module leader, level 6)
• Writing and the Environmental Crisis (module leader, level 6)
• Reading Communities (module leader level 5)