Associate Professor James Gourley

James Gourley is an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University.

My research looks at literature in the context of crisis from the personal to the planetary, reading texts from around the planet written most often in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. My scholarship reflects on literature’s capacity to imagine crisis, considering how stories facilitate social understandings in difficult times, and how authors represent these events in their texts. My writing has been published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Sydney Review of Books, English Studies, College Literature, and in edited collections published by Cambridge University Press, Salem Press, Sydney University Press, Wiley-Blackwell and Routledge, among others. My monograph on Thomas Pynchon’s and Don DeLillo’s aesthetic and conceptual responses to terrorism was published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Given the proliferation of crises in the present, I am committed to showing how literature and stories bring significant and particular insight to the contemporary moment. This underpins my inter- and trans-disciplinary work across teaching, research and community engagement. I realise this commitment by fostering environmental humanities research communities in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and beyond, and establishing and maintaining ethical and horizontal student-staff-activist partnerships at Western Sydney University. As part of the ‘Future Thinkers’ transdisciplinary curriculum challenge I designed and implemented WSU’s Climate Justice minor, which was commended for its partnership pedagogy. More information on my teaching is here. I am a member of the Festival of Action collective; we foster transdisciplinary curriculum conversations, taking learning content out of the classroom and onto the streets. Festival of Action supports the Student-Staff Coalition for Climate Justice, which you can sign up to here.

I am an experienced and ethical School-level academic leader, having convened the School’s Master of Research program (2019) and overseen its doctoral program and graduate research environment as Associate Dean, Graduate Studies (2020-22). I am presently the convenor of WSU's English major.

I welcome students interested in discussing MRes or doctoral supervision in literary studies or literature-inflected environmental humanities.