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

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 Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and Course Coordinator, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in the National School of Arts and Humanities. 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 served as invited Visiting Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures.

Killian’s primary works reside at the intersections of the environmental humanities and literary studies. His first book, Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (2023), furnishes a novel theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned materials at the intersections of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, history and environment, and so on. His contributions to recent marine—and especially submarine—turns in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities also include the co-editorship, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea (2019) and essays on empire’s seabed ruins; marine-invertebrate animalities; narratologies of sea-level rise; the interpretation of Anthropocene ocean futures; and multispecies colour at the Great Barrier Reef.

Killian’s emergent activities include co-leadership of the multidisciplinary Critical Seabed Studies working group and membership of the Australian Research Council-funded Mobilizing Dutch East India Company collections for new global stories project. His second book asks how the concept of the ‘Central Indo-Pacific’ has been articulated at the junctures of literary geography, imperial cartography, and bioregionalism. Forthcoming publications include essays on diving for pearl shell in the Central Indo-Pacific; Jason deCaires Taylor and the idea of a submarine museum; and the aesthetics of settler-colonial submergence.

Curriculum vitae

Select publications

• Quigley, K. (2023) Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean. London: Bloomsbury. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/reading-underwater-wreckage-9781350290013/.
• 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