Erin Somerville
Erin Somerville hails from Canada, eh? Born in Toronto, she was swiftly whisked to Nova Scotia and the East Coast, where her formative years—divided between weekdays in the city of Halifax and weekends in rural Lunenburg County, the Christmas Tree Capital of the World—were spent smelling that fresh sea air and ‘swimming’ in the Atlantic Ocean (locally known as jumping in and out of perpetually freezing water as quickly as possible). Undergraduate studies took Erin to Acadia University, where she enrolled in a pre-med program with high hopes of becoming a pathologist. A chance encounter with a Caribbean Literature course, which just happened to fit into her schedule, and a fear of blood combined to thwart this plan. Further courses in postcolonial literature ensued, as did the bloodless study of botany.
Eager to see the wider world after graduation, Erin skipped the pond to spend a summer working at Edinburgh Castle before settling into a MA in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Warwick. Taking full advantage of being in Europe, she spent just as much time travelling as studying but eventually produced a dissertation on the influence of blues music in the work of Toni Morrison. After a short sojourn into corporate life working for a public relations firm back home in Halifax, Erin returned to Warwick to begin her PhD. Entitled ‘Soul and Soil: Nature, Culture and the Postcolonial Pastoral,’ her doctoral thesis provides green readings of the work of Sam Selvon and V.S. Naipaul and explores the possible marriage of ecocritical and postcolonial theory.
During her doctoral studies Erin was active with ASLE-UK, serving as both Post-Graduate Co-ordinator and as a member of the editorial board of Green Letters, the UK’s ecocriticism journal. Erin co-organized and hosted ‘Trouble in Paradise?’, the first conference to look ecocritically at Caribbean culture and literature, and co-edited the proceedings of this conference, titled What is the Earthly Paradise? In addition to Selvon and Naipaul, she has written on female Caribbean writers such as Shani Mootoo and postcolonial theorists such as Kamau Brathwaite and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Current research continues to explore the marriage of postcolonialism and ecocriticism via Caribbean, African and Indian literature, as well as the environmental potential of travel writing (or lack thereof).
Erin’s hobbies included hiking, kayaking, running, pub visiting and reading, reading, reading. For more information about Erin and her current projects, please feel free to contact her via e-mail.