Dr Dominic O'Key, Faculty of English
deo21@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a Teaching Associate in the Faculty of English. I teach modern, contemporary and postcolonial literatures and visual cultures.
Before joining Cambridge, I held appointments as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, where I also obtained my PhD. With generous Erasmus+ funding I was able to study literary theory in Berlin and, a decade later, teach contemporary literature in Stockholm. I am learning Hindi at SOAS.
Research Interests
My research spans contemporary literature, postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. Much of my work focuses on how cultural texts compel us to think, and to think differently, about our relationship with animals. This focus has led me to publish on topics including contemporary literary prizes (on Han Kang's The Vegetarian and the Booker International Prize), horror cinema (on Jordan Peele's zoopolitics), and the medical humanities (on representations of multispecies reproduction, co-written with Georgia Walton).
My first book, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals, explores how writers write about the mass production, consumption and extinction of animals. Focusing on authors including W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and Mahasweta Devi, I read each of their literary projects as a narrative response to the widespread exploitation of animal lives that undergirds modern life. The book therefore tracks how modernity's "war against animals", as Jacques Derrida once named it, poses a narrative challenge for contemporary writing. Creaturely Forms was shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Book Prize and received generous reviews in journals such as Textual Practice and Studies in the Novel.
Alongside this first book project, I have published my research in contemporary literary studies on animal narrators and literary naturalism and industrialised pig farming, in the environmental humanities on the contemporary valences of biodiversity loss, and in heritage studies on how museums curate and communicate the Sixth Extinction. Elsewhere, I have had the opportunity to write "state of the field" essays about animal studies for ELN and The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. I also serve as an editor at the open-access journal Humanimalia.
I am now at work on a new book project that asks how postcolonial writing has shaped, and been shaped by, wildlife conservation. Turning to works of literature and film from the decolonising 1960s to the globalised 2010s, the book examines how postcolonial narratives have negotiated conservation's vexed status as a heroic rescue act that also extends colonial power. For a demonstration of how this argument works in practice, click here to read my article for Interventions on Tsitsi Dangarembga, documentary film and human–elephant relations.
Primary research for this project was conducted during my time at Sheffield, where a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship allowed me to combine archival research with place-based fieldwork in South Africa and India. Other outputs from this Fellowship include an essay on Aminatta Forna for Contemporary Literature, book chapters on Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh (co-authored with Akshita Bhardwaj), field notes on Addo Elephant Park for Current Conservation, and a forthcoming special issue of Conservation and Society, co-edited with Anu Pande and Susan Haris.
With Troy Vettese, I am co-editing a book for De Gruyter – Marxism and Animals: Capitalism, Socialism and the Liberation of Nature – that will be the first book-length collection to bring together approaches from Marxism and animal studies. With Arthur Rose and Ryan Topper, I am developing a formalist approach to postcolonial literature, with publications forthcoming in journals including ELN.
