Our people

Dr Killian Quigley

Research Fellow
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Education and Arts

Areas of expertise: marine and maritime humanities; environmental humanities; ecocriticism; English literature; eighteenth-century studies; aesthetics; history and philosophy of science; imperial and post-colonial studies; visual culture; Irish studies; genre studies

Phone: +61 3 9953 3119

Email: killian.quigley@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-0628-4046

Killian Quigley is Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He earned his PhD in English at Vanderbilt, where he specialized in the relationship between natural history and the aesthetics of spectacle in eighteenth-century Britain and France. He was subsequently awarded the inaugural postdoc at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. His primary works reside at the intersections of the environmental humanities, literary studies, the history and philosophy of science, and aesthetic theory. His first book manuscript, The Vast Unseen Mansions of the Deep: Submerged Poetics, 1600-1820, examines the figures of sea-going and submersion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English poetry in relation to histories of salvage and submarine science. Another ongoing project, Waves and Places, works between narratology and geographic theory to explore literatures of sea-level rise, with a special focus on the status of oceanic—and more broadly liquid—place. Killian’s third primary research enterprise addresses shipwrecks and other sea-bottom stuff, asking how the histories drowned things tell are inflected by multispecies encrustations and other growths. At the Sydney Environment Institute, Killian was research leader for the Unsettling Ecological Poetics and Ocean Ontologies projects. He is an Associate of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South research group. In 2019, he was Researcher in Residence with Underwater New York and Works on Water.

Curriculum vitae

Select publications

• Quigley, K. (forthcoming April 2021). Islands and Shores: The Pelagic Picturesque. In J. Lamb (Ed.), A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury.
• Quigley, K. Fouling / Concrescing / Artmaking: Three Habits of an Encrusting Ocean. Longform Series. Sydney Environment Institute. https://sei.sydney.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Longform-final-2020-compressed.pdf.
• Quigley, K. (accepted October 2020). Drowned Places: Sea-Level Rise and Narrative Crisis in Elizabeth Rush’s Rising. Cross-Cultural Studies Review 2(1-2).
• Pratt, S., Marambio, C., Quigley, K., Hamylton, S., Gibbs, L., Vergés, A., Adams, M., Barcan, R., & Neimanis, A. (2020). Fathom. Environmental Humanities 12(1), 173-9. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142264.
• Quigley, K. (2020). Expecting plastic: albatrosses and the discovery of ‘culture’. Green Letters 23(4), 394-405. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2019.1706613.
• Quigley, K. (2019). The Pastoral Submarine: William Diaper and Eclogue’s Marine Frontier. Eighteenth-Century Studies 53(1), 109-27. http://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2019.0044.
• Cohen, M. & Quigley, K. (Eds.) (2019). The Aesthetics of the Undersea. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429444203.
• Quigley, K. (2019). The porcellaneous ocean: Matter and meaning in the rococo undersea. In M. Cohen & K. Quigley (Eds.), The Aesthetics of the Undersea, 28-41. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429444203.
• Cohen, M. & Quigley, K. (2019). Submarine aesthetics. Introduction to M. Cohen & K. Quigley (Eds.), The Aesthetics of the Undersea, 1-13. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429444203.
• Quigley, K. (2019). Walking to China: Infatuation and the Irish in New South Wales. In D. S. Roberts & J. J. Wright (Eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775-1947, 57-74. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_4.
• Quigley, K. (2017). Boggy Geography and an Irish Moose: Thomas Molyneux’s New World Neighborhood. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 58(4), 385-406. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2017.0033.
• Quigley, K. (2017). Indolence and Illness: Scurvy, the Irish, and Early Australia. Eighteenth-Century Life 41(2): 385-406. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-3841432.
• Quigley, K. (2015). Grand Tour. In G. Day & J. Lynch (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789, vol. 2, 550-3. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Lamb, J. & Quigley, K. (2015). Longinus. In G. Day & J. Lynch (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789, vol. 2, 721-7. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Projects

• Researcher in Residence, Works on Water/Underwater New York (2019)
• Team Member, Multispecies Justice. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Strategic Research Themes, the University of Sydney (2018-19)
• Researcher, The ‘Anastasia’ Project – Representing Heat Through Performance. SSSHARC Pop-Up Research Lab, the University of Sydney (2017-18)
• Researcher, Coral Reefs: From Threatening to Threatened, Vanderbilt International Research Grant, Vanderbilt University (2016)
• Researcher, The Underwater Worlds Project, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and RMIT (2014-15)

Accolades and awards

• Vanderbilt University, Dissertation Year Fellowship
• Vanderbilt University, Rose Alley Press Award
• Vanderbilt University, Rober Manson Myers First Chapter Award
• Vanderbilt University, Dissertation Enhancement Grant
• Vanderbilt University, John M. Aden Award for Graduate Student Writing
• Vanderbilt University, Drake Scholarship
• Vanderbilt University, Summer Research Award

Appointments and affiliations

Appointments

• Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow, Sydney Environment Institute, the University of Sydney, 2020-
• Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sydney Environment Institute, the University of Sydney, 2017-20
• Lecturer, Department of English, Vanderbilt University, 2016-17

Affiliations

• Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
• Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia – New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ)
• Oceanic Humanities for the Global South

Editorial roles

• Cultural Studies Review (referee)
• Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal (referee)

Public engagement

Public Lectures and Performances

• An Encrusting Ocean: inaugural postdoctoral fellowship lecture, Sydney Environment Institute, 2020
• The Aesthetics of the Undersea: public performance, Sydney Environment Institute and 107 Projects, 2019
• Coastal Thinking: A Conversation: invited member of public panel, The National Humanities Center, 2019
• Recollecting Jellyfish: public performance, Sydney Science Festival and Sydney Environment Institute, 2018
• Coasts and Islands: invited member of public panel, Ireland’s Edge: Áit/Place, 2018
• Becoming Seascapists: public lecture, Sydney Environment Institute, 2018

Public Programming

• Unsettling Ecopoetics Salon: public poetry event co-organized with Caitlin Maling, Sydney Environment Institute at Visiting Indigenous Writers Program, University of Sydney, 2019

Crossover Scholarship (selected and recent)

• Toward an Encrusting Ocean: blog, Sydney Environment Institute, 2020
• Virus Time: blog, Corona and Climate Series, Sydney Environment Institute, 2020
• The End of the Beach: blog, Sydney Environment Institute, 2020
• (Re)Composing the Self: A Collaborative Reflection, with Danielle Celermajer and Christine Winter, blog, Sydney Environment Institute, 2019
• Guessing at Depth: blog, Multispecies Justice series, Sydney Environment Institute, 2019