David Farrier

Professor of Literature and the Environment

English Literature
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Tel: +44 (0)131 650 3607
Email: David.Farrier@ed.ac.uk
Web: Edinburgh Research Explorer profile

Street: Room 2.52
50 George Square
City: Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9LH

Office Hour: Wednesdays 11.00am - 12.00pm

Biography

Background

David Farrier studied at the University of Leeds (BA, MA, PhD). Before being appointed at Edinburgh in 2010, he was Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature for four years at the University of Leicester (where he was awarded a University Teaching Award in 2008). In 2017 he held a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship at the University of New South Wales.

Research

Research summary

David's writing, for both general and scholarly readers, explores the role of literature and the arts in charting the new reality of the Anthropocene.

His most recent book, Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate, 2025), asks what we can learn from the natural world about responding well to challenges such as climate change, pollution, and declining biodiversity. His other works include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (4th Estate/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), which explores what traces of present societies will persist in the deep future, and Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minnesota Press, 2019), a study of contemporary environmental poetry. His writing has been translated into ten languages, and Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature's Giles St Aubyn award for unpublished non-fiction in 2017.