Dr Heather Ray Milligan

Heather Ray Milligan joined Loughborough University as a Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow in 2025. Her PhD on the contemporary ecogothic novel was funded by the Carnegie Trust and awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2024. Her research interests span modern and contemporary literature and culture, ecocriticism, queer studies, decoloniality, and social movement studies.  

Academic Career

• Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow, Loughborough University, 2025–present
• PhD English Literature, University of Edinburgh (Thesis: ‘The Contemporary Ecogothic Novel: Time, Intimacy, Affect, Form’), 2020–2024
• MSt English (1900–present), University of Oxford, Distinction, 2018–2019
• MA (Hons) English Literature, University of Edinburgh, First Class, 2014–2018

Selected Awards

• Carnegie PhD Scholarship (2020–2024)
• The Cross Trust Award, Scottish International Education Trust Award, McGlashan Trust Postgraduate Grant & Burns Shearer Award, and The Acorn Trust Award for postgraduate studies at Oxford (2018–2019)
• David Masson Scholarship, University of Edinburgh (2018)
• Santander Travel Award for climate research in the US (2018)

Heather’s research specialises in contemporary literature and ecocriticism. At Loughborough, she is investigating the relationships between cultural production, environmental activism, and counterterrorism responses. While mass coordinated action is necessary to tackle climate change, little is currently known about the role culture plays in fomenting or demotivating political action. Heather aims to curate an original history of protest and sabotage in mainstream culture to better understand how fiction influences both activism and its suppression.

Heather is also writing a monograph based on her doctoral research entitled Ecogothic America and the Twenty-First-Century Novel. The book explores how a major new genre in American fiction exposes the dark side of a nation increasingly beset by political backsliding and ecological annihilation.

Articles

• ‘Against Entanglement’, American Gothic Studies 1, no. 1 (2025): in press.
• ‘The Queer Time of Ecogothic’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (2025): 1–12.
• ‘How to Blow Up a Novel: Pipeline Insurgency and Narrative Form in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 66, no. 2 (2023): 217–231.

Book Reviews

• ‘The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard’, Gothic Nature 4 (2023): 265–8.
• ‘Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature by Douglas Vakoch (ed.)’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 27, no. 1–2 (2023): 260–2.