Kyra G Morris

Kyra’s work draws on poetics, aesthetics, and environmental studies to consider the ethical and ecological stakes of artistic form—how the forms we craft for the more-than-human world shape our ethical relationship to it.

Kyra Morris earned her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University where she specialized in environmental humanities, twentieth-century Anglophone literature, and poetics. Her dissertation joined literary criticism, personal essay, and reportage to constellate three acts of poetic resistance to the Great Acceleration: the post-1945 period characterized by accelerated extraction and consumption of the earth’s resources. For the three poets in this project, that resistance took the form of sustained poetic attention to marginal places—places marked by political and environmental violence. What emerges from this study of site-specific poems and their formal innovations is an environmental ethic urgent for our current moment of crisis. Kyra’s scholarship has been published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and the William Carlos Williams Review. Her complementary public-facing writing has appeared in The Atlantic and on bluelabmedia.org. 

As a HUCE fellow, Kyra will work with Professors Robin Kelsey and Philip Deloria on a new project devoted to the aesthetic and environmental history of American wetlands. Motivated by the staggering statistics of wetland loss in the United States, this project seeks to understand how wetlands have been treated by tracing the ways they have been represented—in literature and visual art, as well as on maps and in guidebooks, almanacs, and pamphlets. 

Faculty Hosts: Robin Kelsey and Philip Deloria, Faculty of Arts and Sciences