Professor Lesley Wylie

Professor Lesley Wylie

Modern Languages
Senior Research Fellow since 2026

I work on Latin American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on the intersections between literature and the environment, especially in the context of the Amazon basin, Colombia, Cuba, and, more recently, Argentina. I completed my PhD on the novela de la selva (Latin American jungle novel) at the University of Cambridge in 2006 after which I took up positions at the University of Essex and University of Leicester. I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2017 to complete the monograph The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), and, just recently, I’ve completed a book manuscript on the Anglo-Argentine author and naturalist, W. H. Hudson, provisionally entitled: Animist Ecologies: Nature, Activism, and the More-than-human in W. H. Hudson.

Links
Email: lesley.wylie@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
Research Areas
Latin American literature
Postcolonial studies
Indigenous aesthetics
Environmental humanities
Plant studies
Travel writing

Selected Publications

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature

(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Colombia's Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the Putumayo

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013)

Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009)

(Edited) Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023)

(Co-edited, with Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, and Owen Robinson) Surveying the American Tropics: Literary Geographies from New York to Rio

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013)

"Antropomorfismo, fitomorfismo, y la conciencia ecológica en La vorágine"

in Felipe Martínez Pinzón and Jennifer French, eds., La vorágine: centenario de un clásico latinoamericano (Bogotá: UNIANDES, 2024).

Current Projects

I’ve just completed a book manuscript on W. H. Hudson’s substantial literary and activist writings, establishing for the first time the significant role that South American Indigenous ideas about nature played in shaping the author’s environmental imagination.

My current project focuses on finitude in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature, especially in narratives concerned with climate change and species extinction.