Prof. M.G.E. Boyden (Michael)

My research is primarily in American literature, with a special interest in ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, and critical sustainability studies. My book Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics (Oxford University Press, 2022) tracks the genesis of the modern, future-oriented understanding of climate in travel writings coming out of the American tropics in the period 1770-1860.
I have also recently edited a collected volume titled Climate and American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021). This book brings together contributions by leading scholars in the field focusing specifically on the ways in which the climate has left its mark on American literary culture from the colonial period up to the present.
I now have a new research project underway dealing with the cultural history of immunity in transnational perspective. This project examines the ways in which current debates on herd immunity are rooted in earlier, pre-clinical conceptions of the vital resistance of communities in nineteenth-century tropical health travel literature. Employing a conceptual-literary approach, the project brings out the political dimensions of scientific and lay definitions of immunity by asking how communities are constituted through narratives of shared vulnerability.
I coordinate the Sustainable Humanities research group at the Netherlands Research for School Literary Studies (OSL) and I am a core team member of the Radboud Center for Sustainability Challenges.