Barri Joyce Gold, a professor of practice in English in the School of Arts & Sciences and an inaugural senior fellow in the Environmental Innovations Initiative, has been awarded the 2021 British Society for Literature and Science Prize for best book in literature and science for her book Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. According to Dr. Gold, “The book not only explores the way the novel is implicated in creating our ecology-breaking culture, but also how we may draw on it to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world.”

With a background in physics, Dr. Gold is especially interested in the Victorian development of energy concepts, as well as in the nascent ecological discourse of which these were a part. Her first book, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, explores these themes. In her more recent work, she has become especially interested in how the stories we tell shape us as ecological beings, for better and worse.

The British Society for Literature and Science is a scholarly society that promotes interdisciplinary research into the relationships of science and literature in all periods. Membership is open to anyone interested in the field, regardless of geographical location. The book prize is awarded for the best book in the field of literature and science published that year.