Bio

Patrick Whitmarsh is a Lecturer at the Harvard Extension School, where he regularly teaches "Myth and Mystery in Post-World War II U.S. Fiction," a course that explores the complexities of national mythmaking in 20th/21st-century U.S. literature, culture, and history. Starting in the fall of 2023, he will hold the position of Visiting Assistant Professor of English at College of the Holy Cross.

From fall 2019 to spring 2022, he taught in Harvard’s History & Literature program, where he specialized in twentieth-century American literature, culture, and environmental humanities. From fall 2022 to spring 2023, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Wofford College, where he taught courses in the environmental humanities and environmental justice. His teaching and scholarship focuses on literary treatments of the environment and ecocritical discourse, particularly with regard to the ongoing climate crisis and the broader geosocial context of the Anthropocene. His writing often addresses the relationship between the literary novel and popular genre writing, specifically varieties of speculative fiction (such as science fiction, weird fiction, and horror), and examines how humans shape, and are shaped by, forms of ecological, historical, and cultural knowledge.

Whitmarsh is the author of Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science, published as part of the Post*45 series at Stanford University Press. Excerpts from the book have appeared in Contemporary Literature and Modern Fiction Studies, and related materials are forthcoming in SAF: Studies in American Fiction and the MLA volume Teaching the Literature of Climate Change.

He received his PhD in English from Boston University in 2019.