Dr Declan Wiffen

Declan’s recent research is aligned with the environmental humanities and queer ecologies in which ambivalence towards what we call ‘nature’ is a recurrent theme. He is interested in literature and arts related to estuaries, marshlands, lichens, plants, and the other-than-human. 

Recent publications include an afterword to Derek Jarman’s only work of short fiction, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping (House Sparrow Press / Prototype, 2022), an excerpt of which was published by Granta; an essay on Derek Jarman and Queer Theory entitled ‘Staying with the Sodomy at Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman and Nature's Queer Negativity’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2024); a collaborative essay with Betsy Porritt on masculinity, literature and pedagogy published in The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies (2023); a special edition of Litmus on the cultural representation of lichen, including contributions from Lydia Davis, Peter Gizzi, Brenda Hillman, Lynn Keller, Drew Milne, Shezad Dawood and many others; and a conversation with Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo about their project ‘The Hildegard Society for Gardening Companions’ and a queer gardening TV show called bingenTV (Green Letters, forthcoming 2025).

Declan was a co-investigator on the AHRC funded project ‘Unfiltered Coast’, which engaged young people in climate research on the Kent coast through mobile arts workshops and culminated in an exhibition of the participants' work. He was also involved in an interdisciplinary project titled ‘Queer Estuary’, funded by Creative Estuary and Arts Council England, that brought together different arts practitioners to think through ways that estuarine landscapes resonate with queer experience, and to collaborate on methods to engage, facilitate and produce creative works alongside members of the LGBTQIA+ community to raise awareness of environmental issues and empower climate activism. And for Estuary Festival 2021, he and Caroline Millar organised a Nicola Barker Reading Group which focused on her Thames Gateway trilogy.   

Teaching across a range of modules, Declan convenes a third-year special module called ‘The Unknown: Reading and Writing Creative Non-Fiction and Autofiction’ which explores lyric essays, memoir and autobiographical fiction. He has received Kent Union’s ‘Above and Beyond Awards’ from his students and in 2019 he was awarded the Faculty of Humanities Teaching Award. He also teaches workshops outside of the University for various literary festivals, such as The Coast Is Queer in Brighton, and arts organisiaton, such as Spike Island in Bristol. In recent years he has developed a trilogy of queer ecological writing courses, which started with ‘Cruising Nature’ in 2020, followed by ‘FUCK Plants’ in 2022 and ended with Gay Gardens in 2023. The next course is set to be on the topic of ‘queer ecological abjection’. He also teaches a yearly writing retreat for LGBTQ+ writers in Dumfries and Galloway for Write Southwest Scotland.

His pamphlet indiscriminate lanking was published in July 2022 by Invisible Hand Press and other recent creative work can be found in SPAM Zine, FieldNotes, Pilot Press Anthologies, The Mechanics Institute Review, and Strings Magazine. 

He is currently writing a book about a queer seed merchant who lived in Kent during the 1950s-60s.