About

Ben Jamieson Stanley, Ph.D.

Pronouns: they/them/theirs

Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities

Department of English, University of Delaware

Email: bstanley@udel.edu

Education:

Ph.D. in English, University of Pennsylvania, August 2018

M.A. in English, University of Pennsylvania, May 2014

B.A. in English and Italian Area Studies, summa cum laude, Kenyon College, May 2012

Interests:

My work explores how we narrate and understand relations between globalization and environmental precarity. I write and teach at the hinge of the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and food studies, focusing on contemporary environmental literature and culture in South Africa, India, and elsewhere in the global South. I am also interested in multiethnic and Indigenous literatures of North America.

My monograph Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South is now available from University of Minnesota Press (2024). Precarious Eating examines how ideas about food and hunger shape global South environmental writing. Analyzing novels, film, and scholar/activist writings from South Africa and India, I identify an environmental canon bound together by logics less about the rupture and largeness of our environmental crisis, and more about the continuity of this crisis with capitalist globalization, imperialist dispossession, and body-scale experiences of deprivation or gustation. These logics characterize what I call “consumption fictions”: contemporary novels that track the enmeshment of environmental crisis with globalized capitalism through representations of eating, hunger, taste, and agro-food systems. Addressing topics as diverse as GMOs, disordered eating, queer intimacy, food sovereignty, and urban water justice, the chapters in this book consider South African and Indian literary and cultural texts alongside developments in eco-activism, food politics, and eating habits. By highlighting global South authors, activists, and environments, Precarious Eating joins with scholarship from postcolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies to underscore how capitalism and empire shape our planetary crisis.

Recently published is a special issue of Matatu: Journal of African Cultural Studies titled “South African Food Studies,” co-edited with Desiree Lewis and Lynn Mafofo at the University of the Western Cape. Intended as a platform to amplify South African voices on food and culture, this special issue features contributing writers all from (and most based in) southern Africa, with emerging scholars and public artists alongside established feminist South African academics. Contributions to the issue range across the gendered and queer politics of food, breastmilk, and soil; food inequality in the neoliberal state; the burdening of Black bodies with discourses of ‘looting’ and food shaming; Black middle class performances of cultural capital on social media; the role of so-called ‘ethnic restaurants’ in building transnational and multi-ethnic communities; and the heightened stakes of food access during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I am now working on a new monograph, tentatively titled Mobilities: Movement and Energy in a Changing South Africa. Mobilities is about how South Africans get around; how these mobilities are represented in novels, film, and other cultural media; and how South African mobilities (and immobilities) might help scholars and broader publics reframe questions of transit justice, urban space, and just energy transition. Bringing together scholarly conversations on petroculture and energy humanities, energy transition, environmental racism, and queer South Africa, chapters address how South African cultural workers imagine five modalities of mobility: the private car, the minibus taxi, cycling and walking, and trains.

My scholarship has been published in journals such as The Global South and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, in edited collections such as Cli-Fi and Class and Modernism and Food Studies, and in the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism.

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental literature, global and postcolonial literatures, the interdisciplinary environmental humanities, and topics in gender and sexuality studies. I also teach fundamentals of literary studies and writing. 

See CV and Syllabi for more information.