Integrating Sustainability, Climate, and the Arts – School of English
During 2024–2025, the School of English actively embedded sustainability and environmental awareness across teaching, research, and public engagement, demonstrating the interdisciplinary role of the humanities in addressing global challenges.
Peter Mackay (Pàdraig MacAoidh) was appointed Scotland’s Makar, the national poet, in December 2024. As Makar, he promotes poetry nationally and internationally and produces work relating to significant events. A native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis and a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, Mackay’s creative practice connects linguistic heritage with cultural and environmental awareness.
His contributions include delivering a lecture on Gaelic literature and Rewilding to the Scottish Rewilding Alliance in June, a commission to write two new poems for an orchard being planted at University of Stirling earlier this year, and he has been invited to write a poem to headline the Scottish Government’s draft National Island Plan.
In parallel, Tom Jones delivered a talk at the Oxford Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar on Phillis Wheatley’s Meditations in the Seasons, highlighting how literature engages with climate, solar energy, and the ethics of resource distribution. Sam Haddow contributed through his monograph, We All Die at the End: Storytelling in the Climate Apocalypse (MUP, 2025), and presentations including Romeo and Juliet in the Anthropocene, linking literary analysis with environmental crises.
These activities illustrate how the School of English equips students to engage critically with environmental and climate issues through creative, historical, and analytical approaches.