I am an interdisciplinary environmental humanities researcher and literary scholar specialising in modernist and contemporary poetry, ecocriticism, and the intersections between environmental humanities, philosophy of language, and religious thought. My work examines how literary and cultural forms respond to ecological crisis, uncertainty, and ungraspability, with particular attention to the limits of language, representation, and human-centred ways of knowing, and how these shape ethical orientations toward human–non-human relations.
I work primarily on modernist and contemporary writing in English, focusing on American poetry, while also engaging Portuguese-language literature and translation, particularly from Brazil, within a broader transnational framework of poetic form, ecology, and linguistic experimentation. My research brings literary analysis into dialogue with ecocritical theory and mystical traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Christian negative theology, and Taoism. Across my work, I am interested in how poetry engages vulnerability and relationality not only through presence and materiality, but also through silence, negation, and formal restraint, and how such engagements reconfigure relationships between human and more-than-human realities.
Research Trajectory
My doctoral research at the University of Surrey formed the basis of my first monograph, The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry (Routledge, 2023), shortlisted for the 2025 ASLE–UKI Book Prize. The book examines how poets including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings draw on Zen Buddhism and related East Asian philosophical traditions to rethink relations between self, language, and the more-than-human world. Challenging accounts of modernist poetry that privilege secular rationalism, the study shows how materialist and spiritual concerns coexist within poetic form, reframing environmental thinking as both an ontological and an ethical practice.
Conceptually, my research emerges from sustained engagement with new materialist and posthumanist ecocriticism. While these approaches have been central to decentring the human and foregrounding ecological relationality, my more recent work responds to what I see as their relative under-attention to absence, negation, and the limits of language. In contexts marked by ecological, historical, and existential pressure, affirmative models of material presence can struggle to account for forms of vulnerability that resist articulation, particularly in the context of ecological crises and unevenly distributed forms of human and non-human precarity.
Current Research
My current research examines how modernist and contemporary American poetry engages ecological crisis through absence, silence, and negation. Bringing ecocriticism into dialogue with philosophy of language and mystical traditions such as Christian negative theology, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism, the project explores how poetic form registers ecological uncertainty and the limits of human knowledge while cultivating more attentive and ethically responsive relationships to the more-than-human.
Collaboration and Public Engagement
Alongside my monograph work, I am actively involved in collaborative and interdisciplinary research cultures. I am currently co-editing a special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies on silence and its religious roots in modernist literature, and I have contributed to collaborative research projects in environmental humanities through postdoctoral appointments at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and Lancaster University, including qualitative and collaborative research on multispecies relations, environmental practices, and cultural narratives across diverse ecological contexts.
I am committed to public-facing scholarship and editorial work that brings literary research into dialogue with wider cultural, ethical, and environmental questions, including through curated publications, exhibitions, workshops, and interdisciplinary events.
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja 