Assoc Prof Hedley Twidle

Hedley Twidle grew up on mining towns in remote parts of South Africa, and joined the English Department in 2010. I am now a senior lecturer in southern African and postcolonial literatures. Much of my research explores the difficult relation between postcolonial and environmentalist approaches in the humanities, and what questions of deep time, slow violence, climate change and the non-human do to literary form.

In work on writers like Rachel Carson and Arundhati Roy, I have explored the language of public science writing and environmental justice, tracing how unstable ideas of ‘conservation’, ‘ecology’ and ‘pollution’ might be engaged from the global South. Subsequent projects have focused on scientific projects and infrastructures - national highways; the Square Kilometre Array Telescope (SKA); landscapes of waste - as well as the ecological, social and cultural legacies of nuclear and mining industries in Africa.

I have a strong interest in the essay as a creative, experimental form, and I try to engage with and write more ‘public’ forms of scholarship. I am particularly interested in forms of environmental writing, and the intersections between creative non-fiction, global ecological crisis and the arts of environmental justice and resistance.

Profile and publications: H Twidle on UCT Department of English Literature | Website: hedleytwidle.com