Dr Matthew Whittle

About

Matthew Whittle’s research explores the relationship between colonialism, climate change and species extinction in contemporary literature and art. His co-authored monograph with Jade Munslow Ong, Global Literature and the Environment (Routledge 2025), contextualizes ecological breakdown and the “sixth extinction” within the history of capitalist-imperialism, exploring how literature helps us to imagine and create a habitable and just world for all forms of life. This includes a discussion of the commodification of non-human animals by the ivory, whaling and food industries, as well as through trophy hunting and emerging “de-extinction” initiatives. Writers such as Inua Ellams, Witi Ihimaera, Kerri Hulme, J.M. Coetzee, Yomi Ṣode, and Henrietta Rose-Innes are analysed as a means of exploring the capacity of literature from across post-colonial and Indigenous regions to enunciate and interrogate environmental and animal ethics. This work expands upon Matthew’s co-edited special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ‘Postcolonial Environments: Animals, Ecologies, Localities’ (2016), which features his own work on the artworks of Walton Ford that engage critically with the confluences between colonial trophy hunting, natural history, and naturalist art.