Terry Gifford

Terry Gifford (born in 1946) is a British scholar at Bath Spa University and poet. He is known for his role in developing British ecocriticism and his research interests include pastoral literary theory, ecofeminist analysis of D.H. Lawrence, John Muir, Ted Hughes, creative writing, poetry, and mountaineering. He has also published his own poetry collections.

He was the founding Director of the International Festival of Mountaineering Literature (1987–2008), Chair of the Ted Hughes Society (2015–2021), and Chair of the Mountain Heritage Trust (2007–2010). His book D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (Routledge 2023) was put on the shortlist for the Association for Studies in Literature and it garnered the Environment prize in 2023 for Best Academic Monograph.

Education

In 1967, he completed a Certificate of Education with a specialization in Education and English at Sheffield City College of Education. In 1973, he finished a B.Ed. Honours in English and Education at the University of Lancaster. In 1978, he completed an M.A. in English Literature at the University of Sheffield, for which thesis on the poetry of Ted Hughes. In 1993, he finished a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Lancaster, where he submitted a dissertation entitled “Beyond Pastoral Poetry: Notions of Nature in Poetry 1942–1992”.

Career

From 1967 to 1970, he taught at Thornbridge Grammar School in Sheffield. After a secondment at BBC Radio in Sheffield, he began teaching at Rowlinson Comprehensive School, Sheffield, where he stayed on the faculty until 1979.

In 1979, he became Head of English at Yewlands Comprehensive School in Sheffield, while also lecturing at the University of Sheffield. In 1985, he became a Senior Lecturer in English at Bretton Hall College in Leeds University. In 2000, he became a Reader in Literature and Environment, at the University of Leeds, alongside an appointment as Director of Research at the School of Performance and Cultural Studies at the same university. From 2006 to 2011, he was visiting professor at the University of Chichester. In 2010, he was named a Senior Research Fellow at the Universidad de Alicante in Spain. In 2011, he became a Visiting Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University.

Selected works

A small sample of his major works, chosen to demonstrate the variety of his output, includes:

• Pastoral, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2020).
• Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry, 2nd edition (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011).
• Ted Hughes (London: Routledge, 2009).
• Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).
• The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• ”Mountaineering Literature as Dark Pastoral” in David Borthwick, Pippa Marland and Anna Stenning (eds), Walking, Landscape and Environment, pp. 203–216, Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.
• ”The Environmental Humanities and the Pastoral Tradition”, Christopher Schliephake (ed.), Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, pp. 159–173, London: Lexington Books, 2017.
• "Nature Poetry", Kirilka Stavreva (ed.) British Literature II. Gale Researcher, Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2016.
• "Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, Post-Pastoral", Louise Westling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Environment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
• "Nether Stoical?: Re-walking Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Paths as Post-Pastoral Spaces", in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Vol 26 No 3 (August 2022).

External links

• Official website