Dr Henry Ivry
- Lecturer in 20th and/or 21st Century Literature (English Literature)
Biography
I joined the University of Glasgow in 2022. Prior to this, I was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh and held teaching, research, and administrative positions at the University of Toronto. Although, I was born and raised in the temperate Bay Area, I have continually chosen to live and work in places with long winters. I received my PhD in English from the University of Toronto in 2019 and a postgraduate and undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh.
Research interests
My research sits at the nexus of Black studies, the environmental/infrastructural humanities, and literary criticism. My first monograph, Transscalar Critique: Climate, Blackness, Crisis (Edinburgh UP, 2023) argued that questions of scale present a particular set of problems for writers, critics, and policy makers negotiating with the twinned crises of anthropogenic climate change and anti-Black violence.
I am currently at work on a number of projects that extend and expand this work both temporally and geographically, including a monograph under contract with Stanford UP titled Incommensurate Repair: Insurgency, Infrastructure, and the African American Imaginary. In this work, I explore how infrastructure - the social and technical systems that enable/disable our everyday lives - are both an object and method of critique in African American literature from the 19th century to the present.
In addition to literary studies, I am also deeply invested in thinking about music. I have organized a number of projects that are focused on the creation of community infrastructures that build, support, and sustain alternate musical ecosystems, including an archival creation and curation project for small-scale online radio stations with the National Library of Scotland and the British Library. Other facets of this work have been underatken in partnership with organizations including Glasgow International Festival, Counterflows Festival, Clyde Built Radio, as well as an expanding number of other community partners.
Supervision
I welcome inquiries from students interested in any facet of African American and Black diaspora literature, Black studies, the environmental humanities, or contemporary literature. I am particularly excited to supervise projects that bring any of these above areas into dialogue with one another in unexpected ways.
- Odubanjo, Pelumi
Fragmenting the Archive- Encounters, Memory and Futurity
