Kirk Sides is a Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Bristol, UK. His research explores histories of ecological thinking in African literatures from the early 20th century until the present. After receiving his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA, Kirk was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published articles in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race, and others. A specialist in African environmental literatures and humanities, his current book manuscript, African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures, explores the relationship between ecological and decolonial thinking in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century. While at the Rachel Carson Center, Kirk will be working on sections of the project which historicize contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction in African literatures. African Anthropocene argues that ‘the speculative turn’ is a current mode of thinking about climate change and planetary futures that can be traced back to at least the start of the twentieth century, where decolonial thinking is linked to environmental awareness and ecological forms of writing. Kirk has also co-created a series of workshops called “Anthropocene Storytelling”, which employ speculative and creative methodologies for thinking about environmental precarity and climate change. Using narrative as a form of ecological knowledge these workshops encourage participants to engage in acts of speculative storytelling as a way to think about planetary change.