Anthony James Carrigan (11 September 1980 – 3 March 2016) was a British academic noted for his pioneering work in combining the theoretical paradigms of postcolonialism and environmental studies (in particular ecocriticism).
He was described in 2012 as "a lively and authoritative new voice in postcolonial studies".[1]
Carrigan attended Girton College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in English, winning Girton's Charity Reeves Prize in English and an Emily Davies Scholarship in 2001.[2] He took his MA at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.[3] He completed his PhD thesis, Representations of Tourism in Postcolonial Island Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds, in 2008.
Following his PhD, Carrigan took up a lectureship at Keele University in 2009, in the course of which he also held a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (January–June 2012).[4][5]
In September 2013 he returned to the School of English at Leeds University as a lecturer in postcolonial literature and cultures, where he worked until his death in Manchester following an extended period of illness from cancer in 2016, at the age of 35.[3][6]
Carrigan was an active supporter of the Bhopal Medical Appeal.[7] In June 2016, a special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature on 'postcolonial environments' was dedicated to him.[8] A section of the conference The Future of Wild Europe in September of that year was also dedicated to him.[9]
Carrigan is best known for his 2011 monograph Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment.[10] The study was innovative in examining tourism from a postcolonial perspective, and for its argument that "postcolonial literature can shed light on current tourism practices in island states and provide ways for local residents to negotiate a form of sustainable and emancipatory tourism from within the tourism system".[11]
But it was more significant again for bringing into dialogue the fields of postcolonialism and ecocriticism, on which grounds it has been characterised as "groundbreaking",[12] "pioneering",[13] and "rich, complex and nuanced".[14] It has been the stated inspiration for subsequent research by others.[15]
At the time of his death, Carrigan was establishing new approaches to disaster studies,[16][17] "addressing how postcolonial perspectives might challenge, reject, or reconfigure key disaster studies concepts such as resilience, risk, adaptation, and vulnerability, while at the same time asking how disaster studies insights can help frame and inform interpretations of postcolonial disasters".[18]
Carrigan was the editor of a special issue of the journal Moving Worlds entitled Catastrophe & Environment,[19] and an editor of the 2015 collection Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches.[20]