Niall Alexander Peach

In my research, I unite literary and cultural criticism with Plant Studies and the Blue Humanities to draw out an environmental philosophy that looks towards the alternative flourishings of human and non-human-other entanglements, dialoguing with Black Geographies and Critical Indigenous Studies. With a focus on 19th to 20th century Mexico and the Caribbean (or the Greater Caribbean), I probe new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between raciality and environmental discourse at the level of the nation-state to address the potential for belonging and alternative reworlding amid environmental transformation of rural spaces. In particular, I engage subplots within monoculture’s narrative of transformation, destruction, and transition to attend the conceptual and material roles that the vegetal and water have for Afro-descendent and Indigenous peoples.

My monograph, A Politics of (Up)Rooting: The Plantation's Gardens in 19th c. Latin American Literature (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic in the Critical Plant Studies series), an extension of my doctoral work for which I was awarded Purdue University's prestigious Bilsland Fellowship, is the first in a series of book-length projects to redress belonging and race through interspecies entanglements within garden and garden-like sites contiguous to the plantation. Journeying concentrically through the plantation's geography, I look to material and literary garden spaces that uphold and show the failure of agro-racial politics as part of a networked politics of death, labor, desire, and secularization. I have undertaken other work on such sites in forthcoming edited collections, looking at the paddock (potrero), oxen, guinea grass, and blackness in 19th c. Cuba and the 20th c. DR (in Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultures - University of Florida Press), as well as the Silk-Cotton Tree (Ceiba pentandra) in enslaved arboreta (in Romantic Trees - University of Liverpool Press). This work is leading to a future monograph, Refugia, and a symposium on Afro-diasporic plant relations in enslaved subsistence farming (provision grounds, conucos, jardins, roças, etc.) around the Americas.

My above work also extends to water and watery sites, which concerns my next monograph tentatively titled Mexico's Liquid Modernities. This builds on work from my co-edited collection Alexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World (Purdue UP 2023) and thinks through submersion into Mexico's 'heavy waters' and the emergent relations that connect seaweed, scallops, sediment, racial politics, and modernizing infrastructures. I am currently finishing research on the tacit relationship between silt, stagnation, saturation, and Indigenous hydrocommons in the 19th century.

In addition to this, I have undertaken research in intercultural education and experiential, community engaged pedagogies. For more information, please find my C.V. linked here. 

Ph.D: Purdue University West Lafayette, IN, 2022 (Hispanic Literature and Culture)

M.A.: Purdue University West Lafayette, IN, 2017 (Hispanic Literature and Culture)

B.A. (hons): Durham University Durham, U.K., 2014 (Modern Foreign Languages (Spanish, German, Arabic))

2025 -To Present Associate Editor, Plant Perspectives,

2022 -2024 Assistant Professor of Spanish, Coe College, Cedar Rapids, IA

19th to 21st century, Mexico, Caribbean, Plants, Water, Blue Humanities, Empire, Neo-Imperialism, Gardens, Entanglements, Alternative Reworlding, Blackness, Indigeneity.