Speaker Dr Phillippa Bennett

Rewilding has an essential role in addressing the current climate crisis and has also inspired a significant and highly popular corpus of literary non-fiction in which individual writers describe their own personal experiences and processes of rewilding. Rewilding has often been conceived in individualist terms however in such writing, and contemporary rewilding discourses more generally can perpetuate the idea that ‘Nature’ is something other than human, whilst prioritising human needs and desires. In his political lectures and his utopian romance News from Nowhere, nineteenth-century Socialist, artist and writer William Morris developed an alternative vision of rewilding which recognises the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world and understands rewilding as a fundamentally social process. In its dismantling of ontological priorities and its conception of a future based on social and environmental justice, Morris’s vision of how we live and how we might live has much to teach us about the transformative potential of rewilding in the twenty-first century.

Phillippa Bennett’s Research interests
The life and work of William Morris. Nineteenth-century literature, particularly medievalism, the development of the romance form, gothic writing and utopian writing; nineteenth-century Socialism and Communism and the development of revolutionary ideals; nineteenth-century aesthetics, including Pre-Raphaelitism, architecture and the Arts and Crafts movement; nineteenth-century explorations of Iceland and the revival of the literature of the Great Old North.

Phillippa has recently published a co-edited collection of essays on William Morris’s literary, aesthetic and political legacy in the twenty-first century and is also working on a book on William Morris’s Last Romances.