Kyra Morris is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English specializing in environmental humanities, ecopoetics, and twentieth and twenty-first century anglophone literature. Before arriving at Princeton, she received a BA in English from Yale University and an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge. 

Her dissertation, Landscapes of Loss, Forms of Recovery: Writing at the Margins of the Great Acceleration charts a new course through post-1945 poetry by identifying three authors who wrote during this period of Great Acceleration in environmental destruction, but worked against it. Their resistance took the form of deliberate and sustained attention to specific sites—in each case marginal places marked by political violence and environmental degradation. To recover meaning for these sites—an industrial American city, a bog that preserves centuries of ritualized violence, a beach pitted with bomb craters—the writers in this project each created a literary form to fit the form of their particular landscape. The project’s three chapters—on William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Seamus Heaney’s North, and Robert Macfarlane’s Ness—carry the reader from the mid-twentieth century to the present, and from river to bog to shingle beach. A projected fourth chapter will extend the project’s geographic reach to the deserts of the American southwest—specifically to Indigenous lands used as sites of extraction. What emerges from these places and the poetic forms invented for them is an environmental ethic—one urgent for our current moment of crisis. 

Landscapes of Loss, Forms of Recovery developed out of a place-based research method that involved visits to each of the sites in the study. Those visits are the basis for first-person interludes threaded through the chapters—interludes that draw the reader into the geography and history of each place. Kyra’s academic writing has been published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. Because her work crosses the boundary between academic and creative writing, she is also committed to public facing writing. She is currently working on piece on about the New Jersey Meadowlands—once a toxic wasteland, now a recovering salt marsh habitat—that is forthcoming in The Atlantic. 

At Princeton, Kyra has taught in both the English Department and Environmental Studies. Through Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative, she has also worked as a college composition instructor at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women. Prior to arriving at Princeton, she taught in a variety of contexts: as a high-school Humanities teacher at an independent school in Massachusetts, as an outdoor trip leader in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and as a visiting teacher at the Taktse International School in Sikkim, India. 

Kyra is dedicated to fostering intellectual community among environmental humanists. She is a member of Blue Lab at Princeton—a group dedicated to multi-disciplinary and multi-media climate storytelling—and from 2022-2024 she served as the co-founder and co-organizer of the Ecotheories Colloquium. This colloquium has brought leaders in the field to campus, including Anna Tsing, Cary Wolfe, and Bathsheba Demuth.