Treasa De Loughry
University of California, Los Angeles, English Literature, Fulbright Student-Visiting Graduate Researcher
I am a Lecturer / Assistant Professor & Ad Astra Fellow, at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Ireland, having previously worked at the University of Exeter as a Lecturer in World Literatures. My research intersects materialist world literary approaches to the environmental humanities--especially waste, pollution, petrocultures, food.
Broader research and teaching interests include contemporary world literature, Marxist literary theories, the convergence of world literature, world-systems theory and world ecology; postcolonial studies and ecocriticism; modernism, realism and the novel; petro-cultures and energy humanities; food regimes and the Green Revolution.
I am a founder member of the World Literature Network: worldliteraturenetwork.com
Address: School of English, Drama and Film
Newman Building
University College Dublin
Dublin 4
Ireland
Broader research and teaching interests include contemporary world literature, Marxist literary theories, the convergence of world literature, world-systems theory and world ecology; postcolonial studies and ecocriticism; modernism, realism and the novel; petro-cultures and energy humanities; food regimes and the Green Revolution.
I am a founder member of the World Literature Network: worldliteraturenetwork.com
Address: School of English, Drama and Film
Newman Building
University College Dublin
Dublin 4
Ireland
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Books by Treasa De Loughry
Papers by Treasa De Loughry
This chapter examines Thai literary responses to transformations in rice as subsistence to rice as commodity, from the 1950s period of US-funded counter-insurgencies and local socio-ecological change, until shortly after the 1973 farmer-student revolution for social justice and land reform, in literary works by Seni Saowaphong, Khamsing Srinawk, and Chart Korbjitti.
By examining texts by these three authors, this chapter maps a cumulative trajectory from 1950s discontent to 1970s revolution and 1980s disenchantment, and argues for a world-ecological analysis of their registration not just of regional or national political upheaval, but also of broader tendencies in the world-system—of US-led developmental programming, eco-modernisation, and anti-communism. The contexts of feudal agrarian practices and US imperialism are crucial to the plotting of works that narrate the post-1950s transition from subsistence to ‘capitalised’ rice, even as these complex histories and practices are sometimes rendered invisible in literary narratives.
Contemporary reporting on Covid-19 has focused on it’s environmental links—we know that Covid-19 is a ‘zoonotic’ disease, or a virus transferred from animal to human populations which emerged in wet or wild food markets in Wuhan in Hubei province, China. Early discussions of Covid-19 conflated this fact with a perceived food-system ‘primitivism’ amongst Chinese consumers, and an assumption that China is the world’s virological ‘hot spot’. But intensive factory farming conditions in the Global North are themselves leading to contagious zoonotic diseases, including new strains of influenza (see Davis chapter 7). In the late-twentieth century the Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE) pandemic amongst UK and Irish cows, and the resultant human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), threatened the destruction of Ireland’s food safety reputation, and with it a lucrative export industry. Ruth Gilligan’s recently published novel, The Butchers, is set in 1996 during the height of the BSE pandemic in Ireland, and depicts a band of enigmatic traditional beef butchers who are subject to local suspicion once the disease begins to threaten local farmers. Meanwhile an undeterred criminal enterprise imports unlabelled Northern Irish cattle, reselling it as Irish beef despite the public health hazards. Backgrounding the novel are the Northern Ireland peace process, the Republic of Ireland’s nascent economic Celtic Tiger, and a general hubristic celebration of the nation’s reformation from postcolonial periphery to global poster-child. Surprisingly given the dramatic upheavals of the time, and BSE’s easy metaphorization for the nation’s economic greed—it spread partly due to cost-cutting and the cannibalistic processing of diseased animals into meal—it has not until now featured in many cultural works.
This article examines how Adam Dickinson's poetry collection The Polymers (2013), artist Marina Zurkow's The Petroleum Manga (2014), and Rana Dasgupta's novel Solo (2009) use experimental aesthetic forms to grapple with the temporal and spatial distensions of the polluting effects of plastic, an oil-derived product. Mobilising a comparative analysis of petro-plastic works, the discussion examines how plastic, a mundane material removed from its origins in crude oil, briefly loved, quickly discarded, and exacting unknown toxic consequences, is at the conceptual and imaginative margins of eco-critical aesthetics and materialist theory. By juxtaposing works from Canada, United States, and Bulgaria, the analysis suggests that if plastic is a global 'rock', its local articulation is bounded by recurring narrative forms, complex scales and interdisciplinary knowledge, that enliven a materialist and relational approach to plastic's unevenly felt trajectory from ancient oil to eternal waste.
In this interview McCormack reflects on a number of questions surrounding his own formal experimentation, the contiguities among religion and technology, contemporary developments in Irish science fiction, representations of rural Ireland, and the compositional rituals of the everyday.
This is a pre-print version of the final interview, details below:
De Loughry, Treasa, and Mike McCormack. “‘…a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid’: A Conversation with Mike McCormack.” Irish University Review 49.1 (2019): 105–116.
Special Issue on “Food, Energy, and Climate: Ireland in the World-Ecology.” Eds. Sharae Deckard and Lucy Collins.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/iur.2019.0383
This is a pre-publication draft of a chapter that will come out imminently in an anthology on David Mitchell. Citation details as follows: De Loughry, Treasa. “David Mitchell’s representations of environmental crisis and ecological apocalypse”, in David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives eds. Wendy Knepper & Courtney Hopf. Bloomsbury: London, 2019. 133–148.
***For a free version of the published article please visit: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PSARPGE33kyfPaj8ra3C/full
Talks by Treasa De Loughry
Book Reviews by Treasa De Loughry
Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma eds. Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.
Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro eds. World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
This chapter examines Thai literary responses to transformations in rice as subsistence to rice as commodity, from the 1950s period of US-funded counter-insurgencies and local socio-ecological change, until shortly after the 1973 farmer-student revolution for social justice and land reform, in literary works by Seni Saowaphong, Khamsing Srinawk, and Chart Korbjitti.
By examining texts by these three authors, this chapter maps a cumulative trajectory from 1950s discontent to 1970s revolution and 1980s disenchantment, and argues for a world-ecological analysis of their registration not just of regional or national political upheaval, but also of broader tendencies in the world-system—of US-led developmental programming, eco-modernisation, and anti-communism. The contexts of feudal agrarian practices and US imperialism are crucial to the plotting of works that narrate the post-1950s transition from subsistence to ‘capitalised’ rice, even as these complex histories and practices are sometimes rendered invisible in literary narratives.
Contemporary reporting on Covid-19 has focused on it’s environmental links—we know that Covid-19 is a ‘zoonotic’ disease, or a virus transferred from animal to human populations which emerged in wet or wild food markets in Wuhan in Hubei province, China. Early discussions of Covid-19 conflated this fact with a perceived food-system ‘primitivism’ amongst Chinese consumers, and an assumption that China is the world’s virological ‘hot spot’. But intensive factory farming conditions in the Global North are themselves leading to contagious zoonotic diseases, including new strains of influenza (see Davis chapter 7). In the late-twentieth century the Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE) pandemic amongst UK and Irish cows, and the resultant human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), threatened the destruction of Ireland’s food safety reputation, and with it a lucrative export industry. Ruth Gilligan’s recently published novel, The Butchers, is set in 1996 during the height of the BSE pandemic in Ireland, and depicts a band of enigmatic traditional beef butchers who are subject to local suspicion once the disease begins to threaten local farmers. Meanwhile an undeterred criminal enterprise imports unlabelled Northern Irish cattle, reselling it as Irish beef despite the public health hazards. Backgrounding the novel are the Northern Ireland peace process, the Republic of Ireland’s nascent economic Celtic Tiger, and a general hubristic celebration of the nation’s reformation from postcolonial periphery to global poster-child. Surprisingly given the dramatic upheavals of the time, and BSE’s easy metaphorization for the nation’s economic greed—it spread partly due to cost-cutting and the cannibalistic processing of diseased animals into meal—it has not until now featured in many cultural works.
This article examines how Adam Dickinson's poetry collection The Polymers (2013), artist Marina Zurkow's The Petroleum Manga (2014), and Rana Dasgupta's novel Solo (2009) use experimental aesthetic forms to grapple with the temporal and spatial distensions of the polluting effects of plastic, an oil-derived product. Mobilising a comparative analysis of petro-plastic works, the discussion examines how plastic, a mundane material removed from its origins in crude oil, briefly loved, quickly discarded, and exacting unknown toxic consequences, is at the conceptual and imaginative margins of eco-critical aesthetics and materialist theory. By juxtaposing works from Canada, United States, and Bulgaria, the analysis suggests that if plastic is a global 'rock', its local articulation is bounded by recurring narrative forms, complex scales and interdisciplinary knowledge, that enliven a materialist and relational approach to plastic's unevenly felt trajectory from ancient oil to eternal waste.
In this interview McCormack reflects on a number of questions surrounding his own formal experimentation, the contiguities among religion and technology, contemporary developments in Irish science fiction, representations of rural Ireland, and the compositional rituals of the everyday.
This is a pre-print version of the final interview, details below:
De Loughry, Treasa, and Mike McCormack. “‘…a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid’: A Conversation with Mike McCormack.” Irish University Review 49.1 (2019): 105–116.
Special Issue on “Food, Energy, and Climate: Ireland in the World-Ecology.” Eds. Sharae Deckard and Lucy Collins.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/iur.2019.0383
This is a pre-publication draft of a chapter that will come out imminently in an anthology on David Mitchell. Citation details as follows: De Loughry, Treasa. “David Mitchell’s representations of environmental crisis and ecological apocalypse”, in David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives eds. Wendy Knepper & Courtney Hopf. Bloomsbury: London, 2019. 133–148.
***For a free version of the published article please visit: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PSARPGE33kyfPaj8ra3C/full
Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma eds. Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.
Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro eds. World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.