Dr Ashley Cahillane is a Senior Research Associate at the School of Global Development, University of East Anglia. She specialises in contemporary climate change fiction, postcolonial & world literature, and water humanities. Her research explores how literature can help to illuminate and transform human-water relations for more just futures.
At UEA, Ashley works on the Horizon Europe-funded MARBEFES project, developing arts- and humanities-based approaches for valuing coastal and marine ecosystems to inform policy and decision-making. This builds on her earlier MARBEFES work at University College Dublin, where she combined place-based methods in ecocritical literary analysis with environmental social science methods based on public perceptions of human-water relations.
Ashley received her PhD from the University of Galway in 2023, funded by a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. Her doctoral research on the politics of drought representation in contemporary world literature is being developed into a monograph forthcoming with Liverpool University Press. Alongside her publications, she has taught environmental and world literature, co-organised large-scale environmental conferences, and contributed to public outreach.
