Caroline Harris

Caroline is a poet and language artist, writer and editor, and currently Honorary Research Associate in the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway. Her practice-based PhD in English, entitled ‘Aww-struck poetics: deer and poems as “cute objects”’, was supervised by Professor Redell Olsen. She is the founder of Small Birds Press and her handmade artist’s books and object poems have been collected and exhibited internationally. Poetry pamphlets include A Summoning Spell for Lost Deer (Osmosis Press) and SCRUB Management Handbook No.1 Mere (Singing Apple Press). Caroline is co-organiser with Dr Isabel Galleymore (University of Birmingham) of the global research network and events series Aww-Struck: Creative and Critical Approaches to Cuteness and was a consultant on the ‘Cute’ exhibition at Somerset House, London (2024). She co-curated the exhibition ‘Words from the Wild: The Nature of Poetry’ at Royal Holloway and co-organised the related creative and critical symposium.

Current research and recent outputs include postdoctoral project ‘Urban Rights to Roam’ with Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, whose pilot workshop development was supported through the Royal Holloway Civic Fund; journal article  ‘Wishing Ribbons Tied into a Tree: A Poetic Practice for Elegising “Lost” Deer’, in Cultural Geographies ; book chapter ‘The “Plant Horror” of Turpin’s Urpflanze and Hooker’s Welwitschia: Narratives of Monstrous Proliferation and Grotesque Hybridity’ in Images of the Plant Humanities: Theory, Art and the Botanical Gaze (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2025).

• Ecopoetry and Ecocriticism
• Cute Studies and Cute Ecologies
• Environmental Humanities, Animal Studies, Plant Studies, Environmental Philosophies
• Interdisciplinarity
• The impact of arts-based research for human, nonhuman and planetary health
• Co-creation and co-production with cultural and community organisations
• Visual poetry, object poetry and performance
• Book arts and small press publishing
• Exhibition curation and practice
• Poetries of deer
• Innovative poetics

Caroline has taught on the English BA at Royal Holloway (EN1112: Introduction to English Poetry) and was previously Course Leader for Publishing (Combined) at Bath Spa University, teaching on modules across all three years, including introductions to publishing, professional writing and text editing, and specialist modules on independent magazines and food writing and editing.

Caroline has many years of experience in book publishing and journalism, including with The Observer, where she was editor of the popular culture section. She is co-founder of Harris + Wilson, which creates high-spec illustrated non-fiction titles for world-leading publishers (Little Brown, Octopus, Laurence King), and has authored several non-fiction books, including M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have (Flint Books, 2020).