Susanne Ferwerda is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature in the BA Literary Studies, the BA Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Utrecht, and the RMA Comparative Literature. She teaches a variety of courses in Literary Studies and Environmental Humanities on BA and MA/RMA levels. Susanne is involved in the Network for Environmental Humanities at Utrecht Universtiy and in several Pathways to Sustainability funded interdisciplinary research projects, including the 'Whose Ocean?' Signature Project and the 'NATURICITY' Incubator Project. 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.
Susanne 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.