Dr. Richard Pickard

Richard Pickard is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of English. He teaches courses in environmental humanities, composition, and technical writing.

Dr. Pickard completed his dissertation in 1998 at the University of Alberta, entitled "Augustan Ecology: Environmental Attitudes in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry." His research interests are in the fields of environment and literature; 18th-century studies (especially poetry); the literature of labour; and writing from and about non-urban British Columbia.

He was recently the president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC), and he hosted at UVic the 2009 biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). His current research looks at forest company comments about climate change, and about what BC forestry fiction has to say about the ideological elements behind those statements.

Selected faculty publications

"The Environment of Work." Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Self. Eds. Michael Aleksiuk and Thomas Nelson. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2002. 89- 102.

"Environmentalism and 'Best Husbandry': Cutting Down Trees in Augustan Poetry." Lumen: selected proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1998): 103-126.

"Magic Environmentalism: Writing/Logging (in) British Columbia." A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing. Eds. Chris Riegel et al. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1997. 95-112.