This fall, Somerville moved from England (her home for the past five years while she earned her master's and doctorate degrees at Acadia University) to the Nevada desert. Despite them drying out from her new environment, Somerville plans on bringing new eyes to the way ecocriticism and post-colonial literature are taught in Reno.
I got the job, essentially. I've been living in England for the last five years, doing grad work in post-colonialism, but I became really involved with an eco-critical organization in the U.K. called ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment), which was actually an organization that was formed here, in Reno. I submitted my PhD application on Tuesday and the job application for this was due on a Friday. I thought, "On, no way," because UNR is really well-known for its literature and environment program, internationally known. I just thought, "That's huge. There's no way I'd get this job." And lo and behold, here I am.
I would think England would be a good place to study post-colonial literature and so Reno would be a good place for ecocriticism.
Ecocriticism in the U.K. has a very different focus than it does in the U.S. American ecocriticism traditionally has been focused on American literature and ecocriticism in the U.K. is either more focused on the British literature, someone like Thomas Hardy, or people coming up now who are applying it to post-colonial literature. There's a few people who are working on Caribbean, Indian or African literature and ecocriticism. I initially went to England because they offered a specific master's in colonialism and post-colonialism and I ended up staying there for my PhD. My undergraduate background is in biology and I knew I eventually wanted to combine them, so that's how I ended up doing this (ecocriticism). It was cool because in my PhD work, I worked with a lot of ecological theory and then was primarily looking at Caribbean literature and trying to pair those two, which was a really neat project.
Why do you find ecocriticism important?
The obvious answer is climate change. This is probably the defining issue of our age and our generation. It's a problem that is only getting worse and only needing addressing. I really buy into the idea that climate change is as much a cultural problem as it is an environmental problem. What I'm really interested in is to come up with a solution for climate change, which sounds so unfeasible. What it's going to require is international dialogue. It can't be one country or culture that's going to solve this thing. It needs to be cooperation around the world. I really think that by looking at literature as a way of getting to know how people from different parts of the world live with and understand the environment, we only get ourselves closer to a point where we can begin that international dialogue. The stuff I'm doing now is looking at African literature, but it's really part of a project that tries to think about how the way that people in formerly colonized countries would think about the environment might be different than how people in the states would think about it. So trying to use this model that's been set up by American ecocritics that identify particular tropes and themes within the way nature is represent within the American cannon and then do almost a big compare-and-contrast project, really. Look at literature from different parts of the world and say, OK, well this might be similar, but this is quite different, so that can be problematic and how can we think about that?
What do you hope to bring to UNR?
I'm excited to be here to help give a different perspective on what ecocriticism and post-colonialism is about. Nadine (Attewell) is also a post-colonialist, so we're really excited to be here to introduce purely post-colonial courses onto the syllabus. It'll be really exciting to offer students a different perspective. It'll be nice to help flesh out the literature degree and what people are exposed to. The year that I switched from a biology major to a literature major, after this sort of four-in-the-morning epiphany, I knew I had to pick up some literature courses and the only one that fit into my schedule was this Caribbean literature. I was like, "Come on, like that's going to be interesting." So, it was purely coincidence that I took this course and it absolutely changed the whole way that I thought about everything. My and Nadine's specialties really work well together because where I'm more Caribbean, Indian, African, she's more Australian, New Zealand, so between the two of us we can probably put together a pretty decent post-colonial survey. It could be really interesting. I like the idea that we're opening up opportunities for students that weren't here before.