Biography

Timothy C. Baker 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 is centred on Scottish and contemporary literature; he has recently completed projects on Scottish Gothic and twenty-first-century animal fiction, while his current research is focused on representations of climate change and the natural world in contemporary women's writing.

External Memberships

Scottish Universities International Summer School, Board Member  

British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, Elected Ordinary Member    

External examiner: University of Glasgow, University of Lincoln, University of the Highlands and Islands.                                         

Research Overview

Professor Baker specialises in Scottish and contemporary literature (mainly fiction, but he likes poetry too). He is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (2009), Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition (2014), and Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2019). 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; he is especially interested in supervising projects on contemporary and experimental literature (including poetry), ecocriticism and animal studies, and queer studies.

Current Research

Professor Baker is currently completing 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.