Rebecca Frik

Rebecca is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. Her research sits at the intersection of environmental humanities, literary geography, and protected area management, and she is particularly interested in how aesthetic experiences of landscape can inform conservation strategies.

Her doctoral project explores landscape aesthetics in Southern Patagonia (Argentina and Chile). Combining literary studies, phenomenological aesthetics, computational text analysis and deep mapping, she examines how diverse cultural and historical perspectives on Patagonian landscapes have shaped their conservation value. Drawing on a multilingual corpus of literary texts written across two centuries, her project develops a novel method to evaluate and map aesthetic experiences of landscapes relevant for environmental policy.

Rebecca holds a BA in Spanish and Philosophy from the University of Wuppertal (Germany) and an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management from the University of Oxford (School of Geography). Her doctoral research is co-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Asa Briggs Studentship at Worcester College, and the Clarendon Fund. She is supervised by Bernhard Malkmus and Olivia Vázquez-Medina.