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 a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Sheffield and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds, where I also obtained my PhD. With generous Erasmus+ funding I studied literary theory in Berlin and, a decade later, taught contemporary literature in Stockholm. I'm learning Hindi at SOAS.
Research Interests
My research spans contemporary literature, postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. I have published on topics including Han Kang, the Booker International Prize and publishing cultures, postcolonial extinction narratives, and the contemporary valences of biodiversity loss.
I focus in particular on the histories and futures of human–animal relations. I am especially concerned with the ways that aesthetic forms compel us to think, and to think differently, about the relationship between natures and societies. 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 show how their literary forms develop out of a recognition not just that modern human–animal relations are ethically and politically unsettling, but that they also pose a profound narrative challenge for fiction. I therefore read the modern domination of nature, what Jacques Derrida once called "the war against animals", as a significant form-problem for contemporary writing, and my book develops a formalist practice for interpreting literary representations, thematisations and formalisations of human–animal relations. I have tested this formalist approach in numerous essays on contemporary literature and culture, including pieces on animal narration, literary naturalism and industrialised pig farming, and how museums curate and communicate the Sixth Extinction.
I am now at work on my second monograph, which will offer the first book-length analysis of how postcolonial writing has shaped, and been shaped by, wildlife conservation. Reading works of literature, film and visual culture from the decolonising 1960s to the globalised 2010s, this book will be particularly interested in the ways that postcolonial narratives negotiate conservation's vexed ideological and material status as both a heroic rescue act and an extension and mutation of colonial violence. Primary research for this book was conducted during my time at Sheffield, where a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship granted me the freedom to combine desk-based study with place-based fieldwork. Early outputs from this project include an essay on Aminatta Forna for Contemporary Literature and field notes on Addo Elephant Park for Current Conservation.
