Dr. Austin Lillywhite (any pronoun) researches environmental humanities and global modernisms, with a particular interest in queer ecologies and decolonial environmentalisms in literature of the hemispheric Americas, from the twentieth to twenty-first century.

Their current book project, entitled In the Raw: Imagining Energy and Decolonization in the Americas, examines connections between early colonial travel literature that fantasized about the riches of the “New World,” and the present-day rhetoric of green markets and sustainable resources centered in the Americas. They examine how modernist authors on the antifascist Left, from Peru, Guyana, the Caribbean, and Brazil, not only challenged colonial designations of all human and nonhuman bodies in the Americas as “raw materials,” but also reinterpreted the understandings of energy at stake in traditional socialism and Leftism.

Austin’s past work on multi-ethnic American literatures, race, queerness, and posthumanism has been published in Representations, Modern Fiction Studies, and Diacritics, among other places, and they are currently co-editing two special issues, on “Queer and Trans Climate Futures” (ISLE, 2024), and “Queer Environs” (Diacritics, 2024).