Tom van Bunnik is a PhD candidate in the EcoViolence project. His work is situated within the fields of ecopoetics, ecocriticism, and cultural memory studies. Tom’s research focuses on how contemporary eco-poetry frames and remembers environmental degradation as violence.

My project The Poetics of Eco-Violence explores how contemporary eco-poetry represents environmental degradation as entangled with other histories, forms, and memories of violence. In particular, my project examines how eco-poetry mobilizes and reinvents poetic conventions to make visible these multidirectional links of eco-violence. Through a comparative, transcultural, and translinguistic analysis, my research engages critically with Anglophone, German, and Dutch poetry, both from the Global North and Global South, representing the entanglement of environmental degradation with other histories of violence – e.g. colonialism and genocide – to explore how these poets reflect on questions of implication and responsibility in ecologies of violence. In doing so, this project contributes to the EcoViolence project by showing how a poetics of implication and responsibility informs the cultural imagination of eco-violence.