Associate Professor Philip Steer staff profile picture

Contact details +6469517498

Associate Professor Philip Steer MA, PhD

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

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

Certifications and Registrations

  • Licence, Supervisor, Massey University

Prizes and Awards

  • Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies - North American Victorian Studies Association (2022)

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

Completed Projects

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

Date Range: 2020 - 2024

Funding Body: Royal Society of New Zealand

Project Team:

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., & Shewry, T. (2024). Uncertain Waters and Irony in Australian Settler Literatures. Environmental Humanities. 16(2), 351-370
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2023). Review of Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis (eds), Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies. Journal of British Studies. 62(1), 277-279
[Book Review]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2023). The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 58(3), 610-626
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2021). Review of the book Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim ed. by Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck. Victorian Studies. 63(2), 281-283Retreived from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/801010
[Book Review]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2021). Review of the book Adrian Mitchell sensationalises the life of Henry Kendall, by Adrian Mitchell. History Australia. 18(3), 634-635Retreived from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14490854.2021.1956346
[Book Review]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2021). Review of Alexander Bickerton, Morganeering, or, The Triumph of the Trust: A Satirical Burlesque on the Worship of Wealth, edited by Lyman Tower Sargent. Journal of New Zealand Studies. , 171-172Retreived from https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/jnzs/article/view/7392
[Book Review]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2021). The Climates of the Victorian Novel: Seasonality, Weather, and Regional Fiction in Britain and Australia. PMLA. 136(3), 370-385 Retrieved from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/climates-of-the-victorian-novel-seasonality-weather-and-regional-fiction-in-britain-and-australia/D4D1DA080195FCF381868600F2E229E2
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2019). Review of the book Imperium of the soul: The political and aesthetic imagination of Edwardian imperialists, by Norman Etherington. Victorian Studies. 61(3), 502-504Retreived from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734990
[Book Review]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2018). Review of the book Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English, by Tamara S. Wagner. Victorian Studies. 60(2), 321-323Retreived from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/697855
[Book Review]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2018). Review of book Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, by Jason Rudy. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: an interdisciplinary journal. 41(1), 112-114Retreived from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08905495.2018.1541308
[Book Review]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, PMC. (2016). Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism. Victorian Studies. 58(3), 436-463
[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.
Steer, P. (2018). The historians, the literary critics, and the Victorian settler empire. Literature Compass. 15(5)
[Journal article]Authored by: Steer, P.
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.
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.

Book

Steer, P. (2023). Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies: Recent Climate Fiction in Australia and New Zealand. In C. Stan, & C. Sussman (Eds.) Handbook on Literature and Migration. (pp. 19 - 35). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P.L. Rodensky (Ed.)OctoberOctoberNovemberSteer, P.L. Rodensky (Ed.)NovemberOctoberNovemberNovember
[Reference Book]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P.(2020). Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press
[Authored Book]Authored by: Steer, P.
Hensley, NK., & Steer, P. (Eds.) (2018). Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. New York, United States of America: Fordham University Press
[Edited Book]Edited by: Steer, P.
Hensley, NK., & Steer, P. (2018). Introduction: Ecological Formalism; or, Love Among the Ruins. In NK. Hensley, & P. Steer (Eds.) Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. (pp. 1 - 17). New York, United States of America: Fordham University Press
[Chapter]Authored by: Steer, P.Edited by: Steer, P.
Hensley, NK., & Steer, P. (2018). Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal. In NK. Hensley, & P. Steer (Eds.) Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. (pp. 63 - 82). New York, United States of America: 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.
Steer, P. (2018). 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, United States of America: 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.
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.

Conference

Steer, P. (2022, March). Deforestation, Colonial Poetry, and Environmental Knowledge: “The Big Kauri, Waiotahi Creek”. Presented at North American Victorian Studies Association [NAVSA]. Vancouver/Online.
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2021, November). Not Seeing the Forest for the Tree? Kauri and the Scales of Settler Colonial Environmental Knowledge. Presented at Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia–New Zealand [ASLEC-ANZ]
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2021, August). Scott’s Minstrelsy, the Ballad, and the Work of Settlement. Presented at Walter Scott in the Settler Colonies
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2021, December). “The Forest Temples of New Zealand”: Romanticism as Environmental Knowledge in the Settler Public Sphere. Presented at Romantic Studies Association of Australasia
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P.Not Seeing the Forest for the Tree? Kauri and the Scales of Settler Colonial Environmental Knowledge. . Wellington/Online
[Conference Paper]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2018, October). The Bad Form of the Australian River: The Production of Environmental Knowledge and Value in Henry Lawson. Presented at North American Studies Association [NAVSA]
[Conference Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
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.
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.

Other

Steer, P. (2022, May). “The Forgotten Poetry of the Colonial Environment. Presented at Palmerston North. : University of the Third Age.
[Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2020). The forgotten environmental crisis: how 20th century settler writers foreshadowed the Anthropocene.
[Internet publication]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2020, November). “This new element of the New Zealand landscape": Erosion and New Zealand literary culture, 1930s-50s.. Presented at School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University.
[Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
Steer, P. (2019, November). The Culture of Erosion: Deforestation and New Zealand’s Settler Literature, 1930s-50s. Presented at Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara.
[Oral Presentation]Authored by: Steer, P.
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

Summary of Doctoral Supervision

Position Current Completed
Main Supervisor 3 0
Co-supervisor 1 1

Current Doctoral Supervision

Main Supervisor of:

  • Ali Khanihoolari - Doctor of Philosophy
    Conservative Political Ideas and Popular Fiction: The Works of Frederick Marryat
  • Tracey Hepi - Doctor of Philosophy
    Māori Futurism: Speculative Propositions
  • Robert McLean - Doctor of Philosophy
    Not to Exact a Full Look at the Worst: (Mis)representations of Violence and the Abnegation of Reality in New Zealand Poetry

Co-supervisor of:

  • Shahid Shahid - Doctor of Philosophy
    The Representation of Nature in South Asian Children’s Literature in English: A comparative study of colonial and postcolonial texts

Completed Doctoral Supervision

Co-supervisor of:

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