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Associate Professor Philip Steer staff profile picture

Contact details +6469517498

Associate Professor Philip Steer PhD, MA

Associate Professor

Doctoral Supervisor
School of Humanities Media and Creative Comm

My research focuses on the culture, economics, and environments of settler colonialism, espeically in nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand. My current work explores the idea of settler literature as a form of environmental knowledge, and asks what the colonial past might tell us about the cultural dimensions of present-day environmental problems. I am recipient of two Marsden grants, author of Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire (Cambridge, 2020), and co-editor with Nathan K. Hensley of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham, 2019).

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Professional

Contact details

  • Ph: +64 6 951 7498
    Location: 4.54, Sir Geoffrey Peren Building
    Campus: Turitea

Qualifications

  • Doctor of Philosophy - Duke University (2009)
  • Master of Arts - Victoria University (2004)

Certifications and Registrations

  • Licence, Supervisor, Massey University

Research Expertise

Research Interests

  • New Zealand literature
  • Victorian literature
  • Environmental literature

Thematics

21st Century Citizenship

Area of Expertise

Field of research codes
Australian Literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Literature) (200502): British and Irish Literature (200503):
History and Philosophy of Specific Fields (220200): History and Philosophy of the Humanities (220207):
Languages, Communication And Culture (200000): Literary Studies (200500): New Zealand Literature (excl. Maori Literature) (200505):
Philosophy And Religious Studies (220000)

Keywords

Victorian literature and culture; New Zealand literature and culture; Settler colonialism; Ecocriticism.

Research Projects

Summary of Research Projects

Position Current Completed
Project Leader 1 7

Current Projects

Project Title: Settler Literature and Environmental Change in Colonial New Zealand and Australia

Date Range: 2020 - 2023

Funding Body: Royal Society of New Zealand

Project Team:

Completed Projects

Project Title: Realism, romance, and the settler colony: Literary form, imperial territory and political economy, 1829-1915

Date Range: 2012 - 2015

Funding Body: Marsden Fund - Fast Start

Project Team:

Research Outputs

Journal

Steer, P. (2021). The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s. Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
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Steer, P. (2021). The Climates of the Victorian Novel: Seasonality, Weather, and Regional Fiction in Britain and Australia. PMLA. 136(3), 370-385
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
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Steer, PMC. (2016). Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism. Victorian Studies. 58(3), 436-463 Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633459
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2015). The romance of uneven development: Geography, capitalism, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s globalized pacific. Victorian Literature and Culture. 43(2), 343-356
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
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Steer, P. (2018). The historians, the literary critics, and the Victorian settler empire. Literature Compass. 15(5)
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
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Steer, PM. (2012). Figures from the past: Sargeson’s lonely men and the limits of nationalism. Journal of New Zealand Studies. 13, 34-45 Retrieved from http://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/jnzs/article/view/1187/1115
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
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Steer, PM. (2011). Forms of Settlement: Colonial Space, Time and Genre from Adventure in New Zealand to The Fossil Pits. Journal of New Zealand Literature. 28(2), 58-81
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2009). Greater Britain and the imperial outpost: The Australasian origins of The Riddle of the Sands (1903). Victorian Review: an interdisciplinary journal of victorian studies. 35(1), 79-95
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2008). National pasts and imperial futures: Temporality, economics and empire in William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) and Julius Vogel's Anno Domini 2000 (1889). Utopian Studies. 19(1), 49-72
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2007). History (never) repeats: Pakeha identity, novels and the New Zealand wars. Journal of New Zealand Literature. 25, 114-137
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.

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Book

Steer, P.(2020). Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire. : Cambridge University Press
[Authored Book]Authored by: Steer, P.
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Steer, P., & Hensley, NK. (Eds.) (2019). Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. New York: Fordham University Press
[Edited Book]Edited by: Steer, P.
Steer, P., & Hensley, NK. (2019). Introduction: Ecological Formalism; or, Love Among the Ruins. In P. Steer, & NK. Hensley (Eds.) Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. (pp. 1- - 17). New York: Fordham University Press
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.Edited by: Steer, P.
Steer, P., & Hensley, NK. (2019). Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal. In P. Steer, & NK. Hensley (Eds.) Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. (pp. 63 - 82). New York: Fordham University Press
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.Edited by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2016). Colonial ecologies: Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira and writing the settled environment. In M. Williams (Ed.) A History of New Zealand Literature. (pp. 85 - 97). New York: Cambridge University Press
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.

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Steer, P. (2019). Modernism and Māoritanga: Rereading the Cultural Politics of Modernist Appropriation in the bone people. In R. Begam, & MV. Moses (Eds.) Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present. (pp. 277 - 294). New York: Oxford University Press
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2017). On systematic colonization and the culture of settler colonialism: Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s a letter from Sydney (1829). In D. Felluga (Ed.) BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. (pp. 1 - 22). online: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.
Read Abstract: abstract icon
Steer, PMC. (2016). Colonial Gothic. In R. Crane, J. Stafford, & M. Williams (Eds.) The world novel in English to 1950. (pp. 253 - 267). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2014). Antipodal home economics: International debt and settler domesticity in Clara Cheesemans a rolling stone. In TS. Wagner (Ed.) Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand. (pp. 145 - 160). London, England: Pickering & Chatto
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.

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Conference

Steer, PMC. (2017, November). Problems of scale & silence, or, Locating the literary critic in the settler empire. Presented at Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere. Dublin, Ireland.
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2017, September). “Was such a change in the seasons credible?": Climate Extremes, Climate Knowledge, and the Victorian Novel. Presented at Vcologies 2. University of Houston, Texas.
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2017, September). Curnow and Environmentalism. Presented at A Symposium on the Life and Works of Allen Curnow. Auckland University.
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2016, November). Colonial bildung and metropolitan sociality: The mark system, urania cottage, and great expectations. Presented at North American Victorian Studies Assocaition [NAVSA] 2016. Phoenix, Arizona.
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC., & Hensley, N. (2016, September). Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal. Presented at Vcologies. UC, Davis.
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.

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Steer, PMC. (2015, July). Ecology and epic in the settler colony. Presented at North American Victorian Studies Association. Honolulu, Hawai'i.
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.

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Other

Steer, PMC. (2017). Reading classic novels in an era of climate change. : The Conversation
[Internet publication]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2017). Bottom of the lake: How the setting for a classic book of New Zealand literature became a toxic swamp. : The Spinoff
[Internet publication]Authored by: Steer, P.

Teaching and Supervision

Courses Coordinated

  • 139.139 Introduction to English Studies
  • 139.255 Critical Periods in Aotearoa New Zealand Literature
  • 139.724 Literary Revolutions: Romantic and Victorian Literature
Contact Supervisor

Summary of Doctoral Supervision

Position Current Completed
Main Supervisor 1 0
Co-supervisor 0 1

Current Doctoral Supervision

Main Supervisor of:

  • Tracey Hepi - Doctor of Philosophy
    Māori Futurisms: Sovereign Futures in Māori Speculative Fiction

Completed Doctoral Supervision

Co-supervisor of:

Media and Links