Kate Lewis Hood

Profile

Originally from the Midlands, I came to Queen Mary in autumn 2018 after previous degrees at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh.

My interdisciplinary PhD project attends to a range of contemporary poetry and poetics in the context of the Anthropocene, a geological term that is used to periodise the profound and potentially irreversible impact of human activity on Earth systems and processes. Working at the intersections (and non-intersections) of Black and Indigenous studies and feminist, queer, and anti-colonial thought, my project seeks to develop a critique of the Anthropocene’s conceptual incapacity to address interlinked material and onto-epistemic violences such as the categorisation, extraction, and expropriation of (certain) lands, bodies, and knowledges, and the universalising logics and measures of space, time, and the human through which the Anthropocene makes sense. Engaging poetry as a medium of spatio-temporal and social thought and practice as well as a linguistic and material object, my project explores poetics that work beyond or below the Anthropocene’s terms to imagine and perform modes of endurance and forms of socio-ecological being and relating otherwise. Poets and artists of particular interest include: M. NourbeSe Philip, Otobong Nkanga, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Heid E. Erdrich, No‘u Revilla, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Craig Santos Perez.

Alongside my PhD work, I am a poet and editor. I co-edit the small poetry magazines amberflora and CUMULUS, and have published poetry and critical writing in a number of print and online publications. My poetry pamphlet SWATCH was published by glyph press in autumn 2019, and a collaborative work with Maria Sledmere titled infra·structure will be published by Broken Sleep Books in spring 2020.

Teaching

In 2019/20 I am a Teaching Associate for:

• ESH124 Poetry
• ESH123 Narrative

Research

Supervision