Barri J. Gold, Professor of Practice in English and Inaugural Senior Fellow in the Environmental Innovations Initiative, is a scholar of 19th Century British literature, Literature and Science, and Ecocriticism. With a background in Physics, she has been especially interested in the Victorian development of energy concepts as well as in the nascent ecological discourse of which these were a part.
Winner of the 2021 BSLS Book Prize for best book in the field of literature and science, her most recent book, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), not only explores the way the novel is implicated in creating our ecology-breaking culture, but also how we may draw on it to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world.
Her first book, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (The MIT Press, 2010, 2012), explores Victorian literature's engagement with energy science--especially the laws of thermodynamics. In her more recent work, she has become especially interested in how the stories we tell shape us as ecological beings, for better and worse.