Skip to main content

Dr Penn Newell

Positions held:
  • Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
Email
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Penn Newell (they/them) is a Lecturer in Creative & Critical Writing at Birkbeck. Their research engages in critical ecologies and critical climate studies by way of critical race studies, gender studies, philosophy, modern and contemporary literature, visual art, and performance practice. Their writing and research historicises and analyses racialisation, identity politics, border practice, surveillance, disposability, and Anthropocene logics of racial capital via a history of environmental thought in science and culture. Their previous publications and projects have put ecological forms and formations into conversation with late-twentieth century critical theories of the social, analysing the ontologising effects of clay, working eco-concepts in capitalist orchestrations, or militarised campaigns of weaponising the weather against migrants. Penn is currently working on several critical and creative-critical projects about geology, marine biology, and calciferous formations, meeting post-1960s theorisations of social conceptuality via the biophysics of natural forms and formations. They recently completed the manuscript for a novel set in a speculative dimension of today's green industrial revolution.

    Penn completed a PhD in English Research at King's College London under the title 'Tearing and Forming: A Conceptual History of Clouds'. They previously held research and teaching posts at Leeds Arts University and King's College London in Cultural Studies, English Literature, Comparative Literature, and Digital Humanities. Their writing has been published in Social Text (Duke University Press), The Poetry Review, Excursions (Surrey University), Performance Research (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), and exhibited in The British Library. They have convened multiple research programmes, workshops and live lectures on topics such as gender and sexuality, anomalies in art and modes of existence, collaborative research methodologies, urban studies and surveillance, and critical ecologies. In 2025-6, they will convene the Calcification Network, a grouping of researchers associated through their study of and critical approaches to calciferous formations, or bone, shells, coral and calcite rock formations.

    Penn is currently supervising a PhD (second supervisor) on "Geopoetics and Denial of Justice in Ammonia-Related Disasters", within literary studies. Penn is on the steering committee of the Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality and is a member of the British Academy London Early Career Researcher Network. Penn is the Programme Director of the BA in Creative Writing and English and is open to all queries relating to this degree.


    Highlights

    Qualifications

    • PhD in English Research, King's College London
    • MA in Philosophy (Distinction), King's College London
    • BA (Hons) in English Language & Literature, King's College London
  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Penn is currently supervising a PhD (second supervisor) on "Geopoetics and Denial of Justice in Ammonia-Related Disasters"

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • The Creative Critical Seam (AREN221S6)
    • Writing The Self (AREN238S7)
    • Production of the Human: Decolonising the Canon (AREN257S4)
    • Writing the Planet (AREN292S7)
    • Writing and Reading Seminar (ENHU036S7)