Susanne Ferwerda is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research engages with the Blue Humanities and an analysis of the effects of colonialism on aquatic environments and its representations, with particular focus on Oceanic (Australia & Pacific island) literature and contemporary art.
Susanne is steering committee member on the Network for Environmental Humanities at Utrecht University and part of several Pathways to Sustainability funded interdisciplinary research projects, including the 'Whose Ocean?' Signature Project (2023-25) and the 'NATURICITY' Incubator Project (2022-23). In 2022 she was a Greenhouse Green Transitions Fellow in The Greenhouse - Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway, working on a project on the 'green' of Green Transitions. She teaches a variety of courses in Literary Studies and Environmental Humanities on BA and MA/RMA levels and in the UU Environmental Humanities minor.
Her article “Blue Humanities and the Colour of Colonialism” (Environmental Humanities March 2024) received Best Article of the Year 2025 Award in the November 2025 issue of Environmental Humanities journal. Her work has been published in Environmental Humanities journal, Extinction and Memorial Culture (ed Hannah Stark, Routledge 2023), with a forthcoming special issue on “Radioactive Empires” in Regeneration (ed. in collaboration with Rebecca Macklin, Laura De Vos, and Sonja Dobroski) and a chapter contribution to The Blue Humanities Handbook (ed. Sid Dobrin, Routledge 2026).
She holds a PhD in English from the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her dissertation is titled: Blue Ocean Stories: Climate Colonialism and Narrative Disruption in Oceania. In this research project, she investigates contemporary art and literature from Oceania to argue that critical and creative attention to contemporary ocean stories from Oceania opens up possibilities to address the past, present, and future effects of colonialism on changing oceanic environments. Analysing anti- and decolonial narrative disruption to Western colonisation in the Oceanic region, her research engages with work from Aboriginal, Indigenous, migrant and settler colonial artists, scholars, and writers.
Trained transdisciplinarily in Literary Studies & Art History at Leiden University and Gender Studies at Utrecht University, her research focuses on the environmental and blue humanities, postcolonial and anticolonial theory, Oceanic (Australia/Pacific) contemporary art and literature, Indigenous studies, feminist theory and animal studies. Themes and areas of particular importance are: the Pacific Ocean, extinction, migration, (de)nuclearization, and extractive (settler) colonial economies.