Scholars of anglophone literatures and cultures should be ready to encourage critiques of the hegemony they have enjoyed among the humanities and acknowledge a gradual relativization of their corpus and critical frameworks. Ecocritical and decolonial approaches have gained momentum (Vazquez et al. 2019; Rigby 2021; Cook and Denney 2022). However, it would be dishonest to stress the importance of decolonizing the critical gaze only because it is our expected scholarly duty to do so. A way of avoiding the proliferation of formulaic, rhetorical pleas for decolonial ecocriticism is offered by epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos 2014), because they provide critical perspectives that do not create a new centrality, a risk decolonial studies make themselves vulnerable to. Indigenous perspectives on planet Earth are not exclusive to countries that have experienced colonization, while those countries need to retrieve and foster the interconnectedness with the environment they had developed before being colonised. Decolonial studies and epistemologies of the South show familiarities and differences in the focus they lay on capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. How can epistemologies of the South reappraise the relationships, that pre-existed colonization, between the indigenous and the ecological? How can an anglophone lens contribute to discourses of the environment that must necessarily incorporate an awareness of other-than-anglophone and other-than-western perspectives?

Ability to reflect and work on literatures and the arts as systems of knowledge and representation; theory, critique, and history of literatures from a comparative and transnational perspective; ecological thought; cultures of sustainability; interconnectivity; speculative fiction; climate narratives.

The research environment is interdisciplinary, interdepartmental, and international thanks to the activities of the PhD programme in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing, http://www.unife.it/studenti/dottorato/it/corsi/riforma/environmental-sustainability-and-wellbeing. Scholars and scientists involved in the programme are grouped according to four macro-areas: 1. The Humanities and the Social Sciences; 2. Economics and Law; 3. Architecture, Urban Planning and Engineering; 4. Life, Chemical and Biomedical Sciences.