Camilla Royle

Camilla Royle is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her academic work bridges geography, political ecology, and radical biology, with a particular focus on Marxist ecological thought and its contemporary relevance to understanding the Anthropocene.

Dr. Royle completed her PhD at King's College London in 2019 under the supervision of Alex Loftus and Raymond Bryant. Her doctoral research critically examined how the work of radical biologists like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, and Richard Lewontin could inform geographical debates about nature-society relations in the context of ecological crisis.

Her research interests center on the ecological thought of Marx and Engels, radical approaches to biology, and the geographies of mental distress. She is particularly interested in how practices like gardening intersect with ecological crisis awareness and mental wellbeing, arguing that dialectical biology offers valuable perspectives on non-human agency often overlooked in contemporary debates. Her current research project specifically examines the relationship between gardening activities, human wellbeing, and everyday understandings of ecological crisis.

Dr. Royle has published in prominent journals including Antipode, Human Geography, and International Socialism. She contributed the entry on Ecological Marxism to the Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism and published a book titled A Rebel's Guide to Engels in 2020.

She regularly presents her work at major academic conferences including the RGS (with IBG) Annual International Conference, the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference, and the Historical Materialism conference. Dr. Royle has taught diverse modules such as Critical Geopolitics, Water and Development, Environmental Science and Policymaking, Sustainable Development, and Political Geographies across institutions including King's College London and the London School of Economics.