Phoebe Campion

I graduated with a BA (1st) in English Literature from Cambridge in 2016 with the Agnes Cann Memorial Prize for my archival dissertation on the work of J.A. Baker. After working as an artist’s assistant for two years, I returned to Cambridge for the MPhil in Criticism + Culture (King’s College, 2018-19), graduating with a distinction and a thesis on the granular poetics of R.F. Langley’s Journals. I am currently in the second year of my PhD here at Cambridge, working with Dr. Robert Macfarlane on a doctoral project that lies at the intersection of literature, visual culture and the Environmental Humanities, examining the ways in which experimental landscape poetics and site-specific literary and artistic practices have responded to compromised British landscapes (agricultural fields, plantation forestry, upland deserts, etc.) since 1970. These landscapes, shaped by logics of extraction and accumulation, engage attention and perception in particularly fraught ways. I’m interested in how innovative poetics (particularly the work of Peter Larkin, J.H. Prynne, Carol Watts, Colin Simms, Elisabeth Bletsoe, etc.) approach and approximate these compromised ecologies ‘by degrees of distortion’ (Bogost), bringing poetic and material notions of scarcity, precarity, legibility, resource and encounter into dialogue to resist conventional definitions of eco- and activist- poetry and envisage a poetics in/of the commons. I’m also a staff writer for Another Gaze Journal, and an editor for King’s Review Magazine.