Professor Timothy Baker

Biography

Timothy C. Baker is Personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature. He received an AB in Cognitive Science from Vassar College in 1999 and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh in 2007. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities from 2007-08, and joined the University of Aberdeen in 2009. His research and teaching spans a wide range of topics, including environmental humanities, queer theory, and theories of community.

External Memberships

Scottish Universities International Summer School, Board Member    

External examiner: University of Edinburgh                                       

Research Overview

Professor Baker specialises in Scottish and contemporary literature (primarily fiction, but poetry and creative nonfiction too!). He is the author of five books: George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (2009), Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition (2014), Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2019), New Forms of Environmental Writing: Gleaning and Fragmentation (2022) and Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories (2022). Other research and teaching interests include genre and space in twentieth-century women's fiction, climate change and environmental crisis, and contemporary posthuman, queer, and feminist theories. Recent and forthcoming articles and papers include discussions of queer temporality in school detective fiction, ecocriticism and the body, and community in Scottish fiction, and studies of authors such as Michel Faber, Dorothy K. Haynes, and Muriel Spark. Current PhD supervision includes projects on ecofeminism, literary animal studies, the Scottish literary renaissance, autism in literature, contemporary Gothic, and Kazuo Ishiguro. He welcomes inquiries from potential research students interested in working in related areas, particularly projects on contemporary and experimental literature, ecocriticism, animal studies, and queer studies. 

Current Research

Professor Baker's most recent book-length projects are a monograph on ideas of gleaning and fragmentation in contemporary environmental writing and a memoir focused on children's animal stories. He is also working on shorter projects on ecocriticism, community, and utopia, with an increasing interest in the blue humanities. He is co-editing The Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature.