Adrienne Ghaly

I specialize in the modern and contemporary novel, environmental humanities, novel studies, theory, and how literature and humanities methods can address public advocacy and policy change on climate and environmental justice. My research interests include the novel and post-novelistic media, archives of biodiversity loss and species extinction, the literature of planetary crisis, and the critical methods and ways of thinking the novel affords to address the climate and biodiversity crises.

My first book project is Novel Proximities: On Closeness and Relational Life. It explores extreme proximities between characters and nonhuman worlds in modern and contemporary novels of late realism. It argues that these texts’ cultural and philosophical significance is their pursuit of relations that exist at the limits of the identifiably relational. In doing so, they speak to the most urgent question of our historical moment: how to envision, write, and bring to visibility complex relations to the nonhuman and material world?

Emerging from a long-term engagement with extinction studies and a multi-year research project, my second book-length project, “The Aesthetics of Extinction: Four Methods,” tracks large-scale violence against nonhuman life through ‘everyday’ practices and the aesthetic objects and stories that record them, reframing the biocultural significance of novels, songs, advertisements, and art in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I am co-creator with Kirsten Gelsdorf (Batten School and Director, UVA Humanitarian Collaborative) of a global initiative at the intersection of literature, environmental humanities, public policy and advocacy in partnership with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs called Read for Action: Climate, Conflict, and Humanitarian Crisis, on climate-induced humanitarian crisis.

In 2026, I will be a Faculty Fellow at the University of Heidelberg’s Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies.

Publications:

Ghaly, Adrienne. “What Does Biodiversity Loss Feel Like? Realism in the Age of Extinction”. New Literary History, vol. 53, no. 33-57, 2022, https://doi.org/https://doi-org.proxy1.library.virginia.edu/10.1353/nlh.2022.0001.