Professor Timothy Baker

Professor Timothy Baker
Professor Timothy Baker
Professor Timothy Baker

Personal Chair

Accepting PhDs

About
Email Address
t.c.baker@abdn.ac.uk
Office Address

Taylor B14

School/Department
School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture

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                                       

Latest Publications

View My Publications

Research

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. 

Research Areas

Accepting PhDs

I am currently accepting PhDs in English.


Please get in touch if you would like to discuss your research ideas further.

Email Me

English

Supervising
Accepting PhDs

Research Specialisms

  • English Literature
  • Women's Studies
  • Scottish Literature
  • North American Literature Studies
  • Environmentalism

Our research specialisms are based on the Higher Education Classification of Subjects (HECoS) which is HESA open data, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

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.

Supervision

My current supervision areas are: English.

Completed PhD Supervision:

Sarinah O'Donoghue, 'Narrating Autism: New Critical and Theoretical Directions for Reading Narratives of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement' (2023)

Graham Stephen, 'Planting the Heathery Streak: JB Salmond's The Scots Magazine, BBC Radio 2BD, and Scottish National and Local Identity, 1923-1948' (2022)

Pimpawan Chaipanit, ‘A Spatial Analysis of British Women’s Domestic Fiction from Jane Austen to Helen Fielding’ (2019)

Hyginus Eze, 'Social Space in Third-Generation Nigerian Novels’ (2019)

Rebecca Langworthy, 'Genre and Audience: The Development of Adult Fantasy in the Work of George MacDonald' (2018)

Rachel Smillie, 'The Lady Vanishes: Women Writers and the Development of Detective Fiction' (2014)

Brenda Ebersole, 'The Novels of Barbara Kingsolver: A Case Study in Transnational American Literature' (2014)

 

Current PhD Students:

Angela Docherty

Ines Kirschner

Sam McReavy

Chomploen Pimphakorn

 

Teaching