By Arina Axinia

Barri Joyce Gold is a Professor of Practice in English and a Faculty Fellow of the Environmental Innovations Initiative. With a background in physics unique to the English Department, Gold brings an interdisciplinary approach to her scholarship, focusing on 19th-century British literature and science and ecocriticism. Her research is especially attuned to the Victorian development of energy concepts and the emergence of ecological discourse, examining how these scientific ideas are both shaped by and woven into literary texts and cultural narratives.

Gold is the author of Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies, which received the 2021 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize for best book in literature and science. In this work, she explores how the novel has reflected and shaped our ecological consciousness. The book then offers new ways to read in order to reimagine our relationship with the natural world. Her earlier book, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, investigates Victorian literature’s engagement with energy science, particularly the laws of thermodynamics.

Through her teaching and research, Gold is committed to challenging students to view literature through a scientific lens, encouraging them to reconsider established modes of analysis and embrace interdisciplinary perspectives. Her work with the Environmental Innovations Initiative reflects her passion for bridging the humanities and sciences, fostering conversations that address the complex intersections of energy, ecology, and culture.

How does your background in physics influence your approach to literary studies, particularly in the areas of energy concepts and ecological discourse?

Physics and literature share more in common than one would think; the skill sets are largely transferrable. Looking at literature through physics and mathematical lenses, you can see not only the ways in which science and math are reflected in the texts, but also how concepts often circulate in other forms through a culture before they become science. Literature can also show us how our thinking about ecology, especially humanity’s relationship to the ecologies we inhabit, changes over time.

What specifically drew you to Victorian times when it comes to your specialization?

I was always drawn to Victorian literature and did a Ph.D. thesis on how British literature of the 1880s and 90s imagined reproductive alternatives to heterosexual intercourse. But studying energy was really a happy accident. Even though modern concepts of energy, including the laws of thermodynamics, were developed during that period, not many people in 19th-century literature and science had been talking about physics. Victorian energy science emerges from many different places and voices, and so can be hard to track. So while much of the field was focused on evolution or medicine, I was lucky to find an inviting intellectual space. 

Congratulations on winning the 2021 BSLS Book Prize for Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies. How does this recognition impact your ongoing research and teaching?

I never expected to win such an honor, even though I have been associated with BSLS for a long time. I’ve always chosen my work because I'm fascinated the subject matter, not to win awards, so even being put on the short list for the BLBS blew me away.

The recognition did boost my self-confidence, but it also pushed my ideas into a scholarly space, where I see others taking them up. Now, many more people are talking about how energy concepts enter into the 19th-century development of ecology. I’m also pleased to see key energetic concepts used in others’ teaching. 

How do you incorporate your research interests into your teaching, and what advice do you give to students interested in exploring the intersections of literature, science, and ecology?

Interdisciplinary thinking is deeply embedded within my scholarship and teaching practices. I hope to help my students read and think in unexpected ways. Often this involves unteaching what they already know about reading and analysis, since we are taught early to believe that the disciplines are irretrievably separate. But in my classroom, I encourage my students to develop new perspectives. No matter your background or skill set, it can help you find ways into literature. The advice I find myself giving most often is that what you may think of as weaknesses (For example: “I’m a science person, not a humanities person”) can actually be strengths that will make your work distinct from everyone else’s.

Why ecology? What pushed you to study this?

The word “ecology” was coined in the 19th-century. And even though it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people started to define ecology as incorporating all the energy transfers among living and non-living beings, the 19th century gave birth to the foundational ecological sciences, especially regarding energy and evolution. Being a Victorianist gave me an opportunity to see how these sciences emerged in particular cultural contexts, and, indeed, how they were influenced by particular cultural beliefs. In another sense, it was an accident. I was a specialist in literature in science during the time that ecocriticism was emerging as a subfield of literary studies. And unlike other ecocritics, I wasn’t studying landscapes or preservation or even “nature” per se; I was studying ideas about energy. In fact, it was someone else who first described ThermoPoetics as a work of ecocriticism, so I often feel like an ecocritic who accidentally stumbled in through the back door. 

As an inaugural Faculty Fellow in the Environmental Innovations Initiative, how do you see your work aligning with EII's goals, and what initiatives are you most excited about contributing to?

EII shares my passion for interdisciplinary scholarship and the ways we can work together across disciplines to help address our current ecological crises. When I was hired, I was told that it was good to have someone “deep in the humanities,” although that comes with its challenges as well. (Almost no one thinks, “I’m concerned about the environment, better look in the English department.”) But the humanities are key to any positive way forward. After all, we humans created the problem—most of us, without even knowing that we were doing so. And so it’s really important to understand how culture and history has shaped our understanding of the world and our actions within it. And hopefully, once we unpack the often-unexamined assumptions and beliefs driving us, all the stories we tell ourselves, we can work to develop new and better ones. 

Further Reading:

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies 
By Barri J. Gold 
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8

ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science 
By Barri J. Gold 
https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3228/ThermoPoeticsEnergy-in-Victorian-Literature-and