Academic Publications: Books
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4481-6963
Genre Flows: Settler Colonialism and Contemporary Climate Discourse. In progress monograph
Spanning three centuries and the transnational waters of the Gulf of Mexico, this book argues that genre is one of the central infrastructures through which environmental knowledge—and environmental power—circulates, offering a focused intervention in the environmental humanities by showing how colonial forms endure within contemporary climate discourse.
Bush, Tori, and Richard Goodman, editors.The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing. University Press of Florida, 2021. Reviewed in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), American Literary History and H-Net
The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing gathers a century of journalism, memoir, poetry, and graphic nonfiction from Texas to Florida, tracing how writers narrate ecological change, industrial pressures, and cultural resilience across this vulnerable coastal region.
Academic Publications: Edited Special Issues
Bush, Tori, et al. “New Directions in Southern Studies: A Special Issue by Emerging Scholars.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 1, January 2026, pp. 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2026.a985094.
Academic Publications: Peer Reviewed Articles
“GULF” in A Lexicon for Animacy (A Critical/Creative volume). Eds. Brianna Burke and Zoë Fay-Stindt. 2028.
This keywords essay mobilizes the Gulf’s abyssal materiality as a figure for the limits of human perception and the colonial logics sedimented in English, modeling the very work the Lexicon for Animacy seeks to do—forge decolonial, multispecies vocabularies capable of articulating animacy, entanglement, and more‑than‑human ways of knowing that exceed the epistemic boundaries of the Anthropocene.Bush, Tori. “Oil Bleeds: Petro-fiction from the Gulf of Mexico”
“Little Explosions: Petro-fiction Across the Gulf of Mexico” in Literary Ecologies: Writing the Natural World in the American South. Louisiana State University Press, 2028.
This essay contends that the Gulf of Mexico operates as a single, transnational petro‑region whose bathymetric infrastructures and shared geologies produce a coherent field of petroliterature, and shows how Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing reimagine the genre by centering the intimate, embodied afterlives of extraction rather than the state‑centered thrillers that once defined petrofiction.Bush, Tori. "Leaky Forms: Water, Extraction, and Hybrid Genres in the Gulf South" in Forgotten Spaces: Ecocriticism, Social Justice, and the U.S. South. Eds. Catherine Bowlin and Katie Simon. U of Georgia Press, 2027.
“Leaky Forms: Water, Extraction, and Hybrid Genres in the Gulf South” in Forgotten Spaces: Ecocriticism, Social Justice, and the U.S. South. Eds. Catherine Bowlin and Katie Simon. U of Georgia Press, 2027.
Overflowing and destabilizing inherited genre categories, hybrid works like Flaherty’s A Louisiana Story and Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina show how watery environments in the Gulf South exceed and erode the very formal boundaries that settler‑colonial extractive logics rely upon, revealing porous genre as a critical method for imagining alternative, justice‑oriented water worlds.
Bush, Tori & Pallavi Rastogi. “The Environment of Infection in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Environment. Eds. Treasa De Loughry, Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff and Claire Westall. Routledge, 2026.
Thinking with Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome and Ashoke Mukhopadhyay’s A Ballad of Remittent Fever, this essay reveals how infectious disease and environmental crisis are co‑constituted under colonial and postcolonial conditions, using viral narrative structures and hybrid medical epistemologies to expose the lingering violences of empire and to theorize “ecowellness” as a decolonial alternative to Western biomedical dominance.
“Eco-Orientalism: Power Discourses on Isle de Jean Charles.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 29, no. 2, July 2022, pp. 248–59, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isac011.
Eco‑orientalism, as theorized in this essay, names a climate‑change discourse in which popular science writing renders Isle de Jean Charles a hyper‑constructed, peripheral “climate frontier,” using tropes of distance, vulnerability, and “climate refugees” to other Indigenous communities and consolidate state power—revealing how representational practices themselves become tools of colonial control over land, people, and the terms of climate displacement.