Professor Robert Macfarlane

Robert is an Official Fellow, elected in 2002, and is one of our Directors of Studies in English. At the University's Faculty of English, he is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities.

Biography

Robert was born in Oxford, and studied for his undergraduate degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He then completed an MPhil at Magdalen College, Oxford and taught in Beijing before returning to Cambridge for his PhD. He was appointed to his Fellowship at Emmanuel during the second year of his doctorate, and to a University Lectureship in 2006. He was made Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities in 2022. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was the recipient of the 2017 EM Forster Prize for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2023 in Toronto he was awarded the inaugural Weston International Award for career achievement in non–fiction.

Robert is well–known as a writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place. His work has been published in more than thirty languages, and widely adapted for music, film, television and performance. His books include Underland (2019), the book–length prose–poem Ness (2018), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012), The Wild Places (2007) and Mountains of the Mind (2003). He has collaborated with the artist Jackie Morris to co–create two internationally bestselling books of nature–poetry and art: The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020). He has also written operas, plays, and films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), both narrated by Willem Dafoe. Robert also works closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood. As a lyricist, he has written songs and albums with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023) and an EP, Six Signs (2022). In 2022, with the actor–director Simon McBurney, Robert co–adapted Susan Cooper's classic fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising into a twelve–part BBC audio drama series.

Teaching

He teaches across the undergraduate English course, and as Director of Studies, teaches our students across all three years of their BA, from the core ‘Practical Criticism: Critical Practice’ paper to specialist dissertations and options concerning aspects of twentieth– and twenty–first century literature and culture. At Faculty level, he convenes the MPhil course ‘Cultures of the Anthropocene’, and supervises MPhil dissertations and PhD candidates. 

Research

Much of Robert's work is concerned with the environmental humanities. His research also covers a range of interests: from geology and the Anthropocene, to phenomenology and virtualisation. Recent non–fiction books have concerned ideas of nature and wildness; travel–, nature– and place–writing; creaturely life; walking; originality and intertextuality; ethics and literature; cities; public/private space; dwelling; subterranea; ruins; land–ownership; and apocalypse cultures. His current book project, forthcoming in early 2025, is entitled Is a River Alive? and concerns the lives and deaths of rivers and the global Rights of Nature movement.