Caleb O’Connor is an environmental humanities and queer studies scholar graduating with a doctorate from the school of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin this year, funded by the Ad Astra scholarship. His doctoral research reads emergent forms of indigenous and queer (indigiqueer) poetry for cultural responses to the ways in which the governance of urban water, energy, and food systems contribute to the displacement of queer communities in the contemporary United States.
As a Fulbright scholar, Caleb will be working with the Gallatin WetLab team at New York University to facilitate a series of workshops on queer ecopoetics and conducting a series of walking interviews with queer New Yorkers, which will inform his first monograph on queer urban ecologies. Caleb is also one of Dublin’s Pride Poets and has performed on the main stage of Dublin Pride (2022/23), and hopes to experience new forms of spoken word in New York City.