Kirk Bryan Sides

Kirk is Assistant Professor in English. Prior to his appointment in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Kirk was a Lecturer (US Assistant Professor equivalent) in World Literatures in English at the University of Bristol, UK. After receiving his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA, Kirk was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published articles in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, and Critical Philosophy of Race, as well others.

Kirk’s research focuses on environmental thinking in African literatures from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. A specialist in African environmental literatures and humanities, his current book manuscript, African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures, explores the relationship between ecological and decolonial thinking in African literary and cultural production across the 20th century.

His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Brigstow Institute. In 2021, Kirk was a “Futures” Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society in Munich, as well as a Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Penn State Humanities Institute.

Kirk has also co-created a series of workshops, titled “Anthropocene Storytelling,” which employ speculative and creative methodologies for thinking about environmental precarity and climate change. Using narrative as a form of ecological knowledge these workshops encourage participants to engage in acts of speculative storytelling as a way to think about planetary change. “Anthropocene Storytelling” has been hosted by numerous institutions and platforms including the Pennsylvania State University, the University of the Witwatersrand, and “Visions & Voices” at the University of Southern California.