{"id":22,"date":"2012-09-05T11:22:33","date_gmt":"2012-09-05T15:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/template\/?page_id=22"},"modified":"2026-07-27T04:44:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T08:44:47","slug":"research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<section class=\"fullwidth-text-block\">\r\n\t<div class=\"container px-0 pt-5\">\r\n\t\t<div class=\"row align-items-start\">\r\n\t\t\t<div class=\"col-12\">\r\n\t\t\t\t\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Research<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>My research and teaching are centered on the poetics and ethics of ecological crisis and climate change, with particular focus on intersectional (fully human) and interspecies (more-than-human) approaches to climate equity, justice, and resilience. I\u2019m also a scholar of science fiction literature and film from the mid-nineteenth century through to the contemporary era. In my role as the Assistant Director for Humanities Research of the UF <a href=\"http:\/\/astraeus\">Astraeus Space Institute<\/a>, I work to advance conversation and cross-pollination across UF\u2019s space communities in the sciences, humanities, and the arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>As of Fall 2025, my writing projects in press or in progress include\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>\u2026a cross-reading of Belgian ethologist and philosopher Vinciane Despret\u2019s 2021 novella <em>Autobiographie d\u2019un poulpe<\/em> [<em>Autobiography of an octopus<\/em>] with transgressive French philosopher Georges Bataille&#8217;s 1941 novella <em>Madame Edwarda<\/em>, addressing Bataille\u2019s dubious assertion that nonhuman animality exists in absolute, continuous immanence, without knowledge of negation;<\/li>\n<li>\u2026a related sketch of a Bataillean blue ecopoetics, drawing on his frequent littoral and riverine figures of speech;<\/li>\n<li>\u2026an essay on the origins of the fatalist arc of environmental science fiction in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century accounts of deep time and the Second Law of Thermodynamics;<\/li>\n<li>\u2026an essay on Jules Verne\u2019s interest in the 1888 opposition of Mars and reports by contemporary French and Italian astronomers of catastrophic flooding in the Martian region of Syrtis Major Planum;<\/li>\n<li>\u2026an essay applying Walter Benjamin\u2019s concept of the <em>Uberleben<\/em> (\u201cafterlife\u201d) of translation to the legacies of the simply terrible Victorian and Edwardian English translations of Verne;<\/li>\n<li>\u2026an essay on \u201cweird orality and convivial dying\u201d in Ishir\u014d Honda\u2019s 1963 tokusatsu film <em>Matango<\/em>.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I am working on three book-length projects: an edited collection of essays,\u00a0<em>Plant Life: Exploring Vegetal Worlds in the Harn Museum Collection,<\/em>\u00a0a collection of essays co-edited with M. Elizabeth Ginway,\u00a0<em>Latin America Writes Back: Political and Ecological Crisis in Science Fiction<\/em>,\u00a0and a single-author monograph,\u00a0<em>Beware the Blob<\/em>, on the poetics of \u201cunquiet matter\u201d in contemporary climate fiction and film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\r\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1141,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"featured_post":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-22","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":607,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22\/revisions\/607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/tharpold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}