Michelle Clarke

Postdoctoral Researcher, Philosophy and Genre Project
Michelle Louise Clarke is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth, working within the ERC-funded project Philosophy and Genre: Creating a Textual Basis for African Philosophy. Her research bridges African literature, philosophy, and environmental ethics, focusing on ecocritical discourse in African speculative fiction. She explores how science fiction, speculative genres, and imaginative futures can generate tangible insights for sustainability and environmental policy.

Michelle completed her PhD at SOAS, University of London, where she examined how colonial imaginings of wilderness, oceanic, and outer-space frontiers are reimagined within African literatures. She also holds a Research Master’s degree from Lancaster University and has conducted fieldwork in Uganda and Ghana on climate change, oral history, and land use.

Her recent publications include New Waves: African Environmental Ethics and Ocean Ecosystems and an editorial on African Science Fiction for Vector, the journal of the British Science Fiction Association. Her forthcoming monograph, From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction (Peter Lang, 2022), examines ecological and philosophical frontiers in African speculative narratives.