Professor Natalie Pollard

Natalie's research expertise is in environmental and digital humanities; health, wellbeing and technology; and formal and contextual approaches to modern and contemporary literature and visual culture. She has a particular interest in connections between poetry, fiction and theory across periods, especially Early Modern and Romantic influences on Modernist and Contemporary writing.

Natalie's most recent single-authored book, 21st-Century Climate Imaginaries was published by Bloomsbury in November 2025. It shows how many iconic climate crisis images and ecological narratives produced in the global north have problematically shaped how environmental change is now understood and managed. This book showcases the signifiance of more socially just - and effective - climate imaginaries, emerging from a range of global south, Indigenous-led and anti-colonial movements. Natalie is the author of two earlier monographs: Fugitive Pieces: Poetry, Publishing and Visual Culture from Late Modernism to the 21C (Oxford UP, 2020) and Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (OUP, 2012), and the editor of Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays (Edinburgh UP, 2014). She is also the director of Unhoming Pedagogies, a network which brings together global scholars and students to consider the potential for challenging educational norms, colonial knowledge structures and power hierarchies, through practices that involve creative transformation, risk-taking, care for the future, collaboration across disciplines, and environmental, technological, and social justice agendas. A new special issue on AI and Education will be published in Autumn 2026.

Natalie has active research and teaching interests at the intersections of the arts, humanites, digital cultures and natural/social sciences. Her current transdisciplinary research project - with scholars in psychology, sleep science, engineering, medicine and computer science - explores the technological and narrative potentials for new and emerging understandings of health and wellbeing. In a world where continuous self-monitoring is increasingly prevalent, how are AI wearable technologies changing knowlege and first-hand experience of the body and mind?

Natalie also has particular interest in the following Victorian, Modernist and Contemporary writers, amongst others: Craig Santos Perez, Alice Oswald, Rita Wong, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, J.R. Carpenter, Jordan Abel, Cecilia Vicuña, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Zoe Wicomb, Ivan Vladislavic, Denise Riley, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes.

Research supervision:

I am open to discussing future research proposals on any relevant subject in my research areas. I would be especially happy to consider working with candidates with interests in the following areas: contemporary literature, environmental humanities and environmental intelligence, digital cultures, transdisciplinary approaches to writing and culture, 21C poetics and ecological care, Modernism, issues-based theory/criticism, anti-colonial and decolonial practices in HE, writing and philosophy, AI poetry and poetics, digital sexualities, artworks as forms of knowledge, publishing cultures and anti-canonicity, literature and the plastic arts (especially architecture, sculpture), the repurposing of classical, medieval, early modern artefacts in contemporary culture, posthumanist and new materialist approaches to research.