Abigail Bleach

Dr. Abigail Bleach serves as a Visiting Research Fellow at University College London's Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) from October 2024 to September 2025, following her 2023-24 IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellowship in Languages of the Anthropocene.

Her educational journey includes a BA in English from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York, and a PhD from the University of Manchester. Her doctoral work pioneered connections between Old English literature and contemporary climate crises through dialogues with modern ecofiction and ecophilosophy, now being developed into the monograph Troubling Times: Old English, Ecocriticism, and the Temporality of Ecological Crisis.

Abigail's research interrogates ecological crisis temporality through Old English texts and nuclear semiotics, examining how narrative—both literary and embedded in non-human matter—communicates risk across deep time. She investigates medieval material repurposing in confronting unimaginable futures, exemplified by Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, within the framework of more-than-human ecologies during environmental emergencies.

She co-convened the Languages of the Anthropocene research cluster with Cydney Phillip, fostering interdisciplinary exploration of language's role in reshaping ecological narratives during planetary crises.