This project investigates how becoming-animal storytelling locates us in the natural world. The topic will be explored from two perspectives, first an eco-critical analysis of shape-shifting motifs in contemporary young adult literature, and second a pedagogical exploration of the environmental potential of shape-shifting storytelling in a creative writing classroom. Animal transformation tales in folklore will be compared with contemporary re-tellings in writers from Philip Pullman to Ursula le Guin, and both traditional versions and re-tellings will be used as classroom inspiration to explore our changing relationship to the hinge, or boundary, between human and animal.
(Supervisors: Prof Bill Gray and Dr Hugh Dunkerley; Advisor: Dr Duncan Reavey)