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Dr Flora Sagers is an IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellow in Languages of the Future for 2024-25.
Dr Flora Sagers (PhD, York; MA Cantab) is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer in comparative and contemporary cultural studies. She is primarily concerned with the relationship between the written and unwritten world: how do words construct worlds? How might literary structures reflect, restore, or redeem the structures that underpin our political, social, and ecological worlds? Flora’s research focuses on mapping ecological, cultural, social, and political structures on to one another to uncover the structures of the Anthropocene. Her work on the literary serial saw her smuggle a term from musical scholarship—the ‘serialism’—to investigate the unique temporal, spatial, and political vectors of the form, examining how the words of the contemporary literary series can create worlds otherwise which inform and transform our own. The monograph of this project – Serialism: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Anthropocene in Contemporary Literature – is currently under submission. Building on this framework, her current research extends serialism from literature to analyse Anthropocene spatiality to explore the potential for this method in participatory and future-oriented world-building.
As part of her work as a Quirk Postdoctoral Fellow in Languages of the Future, Flora co-organises the ‘Languages of the Future’ research cluster, organising reading groups, sandpit sessions, workshops, and a special collection which examines the interrelationship between languages, futurity, and the post-apocalypse.
Current Project
I aim to explore Venice as an allegory for all Anthropocene spaces through a serial approach: a monograph, a series of soundwalks, and crowdsourced and autoethnographic reactions to the soundwalks. The monograph, structured around Venice’s six sestieri, utilises a deconstructive methodology from my PhD—serialism—to analyse and map Venice’s ecological, material, cultural, and socio-political narratives. Employing post-apocalyptic frameworks, I aim to transcend the apocalyptic discourse surrounding Venice, situating it as a symbol of resilience and redemption. To develop this, I situate Venice as an Anthropocene allegory; a space through which the con- and de-struction of spaces of all types can be better understood, restor(i)ed and redeemed. I invert Calvino’s assertion in Invisible Cities (1974) that ‘every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice’ to argue that to speak about Venice is to speak about all cities. Concurrently, I will create a series of ‘soundwalks’ (Westerkamp, 2021) around the six sestieri of the città storica as a way of giving voice to, recording, listening, and responding to the more-than-human world of Venice. This auditory immersion evokes memories and requires the listener to participate in constructing the city—the listener must visualise the soundscape. By crowdsourcing reactions to the soundwalks, I put the tourist, the city, and the environment into dialogue with each other, exploring the power of attentive listening, memory, affective experience, and imagination through a virtual form of tourism. Thereby creating a series of communities of temporary Venetians who engage in virtual, auditory, and ambulatory versions of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 2011).
This interdisciplinary project explores the potential of the serialism in holding the multiple interwoven temporalities of the Anthropocene together, and in post-apocalyptic and participatory world-building. The appropriately serial form of distribution will foster public engagement, a re-consideration of the importance of structural analysis in Anthropocene scholarship, and create temporary (virtual) communities of walkers, readers, and listeners to participate in dialogues about what, how, and who speaks about the environment, and why it matters.
Teaching
Flora has taught a number of different undergraduate programmes at the University of York in the Department for English and Related Literature. In her first year teaching there (2022) , she was nominated by students for the 'Teacher of the Year' Award and went on to teach several more courses before the end of her PhD study. One of her highlights while teaching at York was her work bridging the gap between school and university teaching through the University of York's highly-successful MOOC - 'How to Read a Poem'. Flora curated, facilitated, and helped to create this course which as been studied by nearly 18,000 learners, with an average 4.6* rating.
Alongside academia, Flora previously pursued a career in teaching English at secondary-school level and during her time teaching, she was appointed as an Assistant Head of English and as a Head of Sixth Form Scholarship. Through this work, Flora designed curricula during Covid, and created a course on the Anthropocene which aimed to make this complex academic term a site of learning and passion for school children, too. Flora has always been passionate about sharing research with schools, inspiring children beyond the curriculum, and working carefully as a pastoral leader, too. As part of her pastoral work, Flora trained as a High-Level Coach and Mentor; she regularly maintains training in safeguarding and mental health first aid.
