ACU Researcher

Dr Killian Quigley

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

Areas of expertise: oceanic humanities; environmental humanities; ecocriticism; eighteenth-century studies; British literature; Irish literature; history of aesthetics

HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Provisional

Phone: +61 3 9953 3119

Email: killian.quigley@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-0628-4046

Killian Quigley is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He completed his PhD in English at Vanderbilt, where he earned the John M. Aden, Robert Manson Myers, and Rose Alley Press awards. He was subsequently awarded the inaugural postdoc at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. In 2023, he was an invited visiting fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures.

Killian is a scholar of environmental, and especially oceanic, form. He is co-editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea (2019), the first book-length examination of submarine realms in Western aesthetic history from the early modern period to the present. The Aesthetics of the Undersea has helped mobilize recent underwater turns in ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and elsewhere. Killian's first monograph, Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (2023), asks how shipwrecks and salvage make meaning. It theorizes three 'habits' of meaning-making-fouling, concrescing, and artmaking-aslant categories like artefact and ecofact, graveyard and artificial reef, deterioration and ornamentation, and on.

Seascape, seabeds, and diving are central preoccupations of Killian's other recent and emerging works. His studies of the marine picturesque, Anthropocene 'inaesthetics,' and narratologies of rising seas describe an ambivalent aesthetics of seascape that is developed as well as disrupted by contemporary crises. Killian is co-founder of an international working group in critical seabed studies, and he leads a Melburnian collective devoted to situating a 'benthic humanities' across local and planetary scales. The latter project is generously funded by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. Killian's research on diving focuses especially on literary and filmic depictions of labour and recreation, as well as on early modern histories of imperial salvage, in the Indo-Pacific. The second of these undertakings has been supported by Mobilising Dutch East India Company collections for new global stories, an Australian Research Council Linkage Project.

Killian is co-developer of ACU's minor in Environmental Humanities. Within that sequence, he teaches 'Environmental Humanities,' 'Literature and the Environment,' and 'The Oceanic Humanities.' At ACU, the University of Sydney, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, and Vanderbilt, Killian has led courses in American literature, British literature, the history of literary criticism, ecocriticism, marine poetics, the literature of the American South, Anglophone fiction, and more.

Select publications

• Quigley, K. (2025). Wreck. Eighteenth-Centry Studies 59(1), 47-52.
• Hamilton, J., Potter, E. & Quigley, K. (2025). Do Stories Need Critics? Environmental Storyism and the Ends of Ecocriticism. Textual Practice 39(8), 1302-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2024.2348066.
• Quigley, K. (2025). Submarine Museums: Jason deCaires Taylor and the Exhibitory Ocean. In Felicity Picken and Emma Waterton (Eds.), Shores, Surfaces and Depths: Oceanic Cultures of Tourism and Leisure, 207-27. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003248231-15.
• Quigley, K. (2025). 'From the viewpoint of their native element': Diving in the colonial undersea. In Maxine Newlands and Claire Hansen (Eds.), Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, 82-92. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003365501-9.
• Quigley, K. (2025). Medium in Chris Bond's Drawing Practice: Reproductive Negations. In Lexi Eikelboom and David Newheiser (Eds.), Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding, 93-102. London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350474215.ch-11.
• Quigley, K. (2024). When the Whales and Seals are Gone: Verne, Toussenel, and the Brave New Ocean. In Vera Fibisan and Rachel Murray (Eds.), Blue Extinction in Literature, Art, and Culture, 41-56. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-69910-8_3.
• Quigley, K. (2023). Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean. London: Bloomsbury. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/reading-underwater-wreckage-9781350290013/.
• Quigley, K. (2023). Drowned Places: Sea-Level Rise and Narrative Crisis in Elizabeth Rush's Rising. Narrative 31(2), 198-212. https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2023.0010.
• Quigley, K. (2023). Concretion: Submarine Growths and Imperial Wrecks. Critical Times 6(3), 517-39. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10800341.
• Quigley, K. (2023). The Encrusting Ocean: Life-Forms of the Spongy Wreck. In Kaori Nagai (Ed.), Maritime Animals: Ships, Species, Stories, 177-96. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780271096407-012/html.
• Quigley, K. (2022). Reading the Anthropocene Ocean. In Christoph Rosol and Giulia Rispoli (Eds.), Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt. https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/reading-the-anthropocene-ocean.
• Quigley, K. (2022). Oceans. In Peter Marks, Fátima Vieira, and Jennifer Wagner Lawlor (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature, 511-22. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-88654-7_40.
• Quigley, K. (2021). Caring for colour: Multispecies aesthetics at the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland Review 28(2), 92-83. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2022.4.
• Quigley, K. (2021). Islands and Shores: The Pelagic Picturesque. In J. Lamb (Ed.), A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment, 113-33. London: Bloomsbury.
• Quigley, K. (2020) 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.
• 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

• Humanities at the Seabed: Cultures of the Ocean Floor, ACU Rome (2022)
• 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

• The Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ANZSECS)
• Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia - New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ)
• Oceanic Humanities for the Global South

Editorial roles

• Peer reviewer, academic journals: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies; Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History; Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal
• Peer reviewer, academic book manuscripts: Bloomsbury A

Public engagement

Public Lectures and Performances

• Dead Calm: Refuge, Threat and Oceanscape, with Fincina Hopgood and Dylan Bird, for Seeing Green, a podcast produced by Swinburne University of Technology and Monash University, 2022.
• The Aesthetics of Violence, chair, Sydney Environment Institute, 2021.
• 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