Dr Maria Sledmere

Senior Lecturer

English & Creative Writing

Contact

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Personal statement

I joined Strathclyde in 2022 as a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry). My research and practice are wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and collaborative, exploring themes of ecology, technology and the everyday in literature. I have also taught English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, focusing on: poetry and poetics; nature and ecology; class, queerness and race in contemporary experimental writing; editing and publishing. Outside of academia, through organisations including Beyond Form Creative Writing, Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities and Glasgow Goes Green Festival, I have taught regular workshops and led courses on areas such as dream ecologies, the everyday, refusal and failure, experimental journaling, entanglement, poetry and pop music, trash poetics, weather and postcapitalist desire. I am also a poet, artist, essayist, music journalist and editor, working between lyric, long-form and traditional forms such as sonnets, sestinas and ‘the commonplace book’. My work as a writer, critic and collaborator has been highlighted in places such as It’s Nice That, Scottish Contemporary Artists Network, BBC Radio 3, The White Review, Dazed, The Skinny and The Poetry Project. My poem ‘Ariosos for Lavish Matter’ was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize and a piece of creative-critical response to the work of Etel Adnan, Tangents, was long-listed for the Ivan Juritz Visual Arts Prize. My pamphlet, Polychromatics (Legitimate Snack, 2021), was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Calum Macdonald Award.

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Teaching

I teach English and Creative Writing at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

I would be open to PhD/MRes/MPhil proposals in English on the following topics:

  • Twentieth and twenty-first century Anglo-American poetry and poetics
  • Ecopoetics and ecocriticism 
  • Literature, energy and infrastructure 
  • Small press poetries and publishing
  • Post-internet art and poetry 
  • Literary theory 
  • Modernity and the everyday 

I would be open to Creative Writing PhD/MRes/MPhil proposals on the following topics:

I am particularly interested in poetry and nonfiction which explores themes of ecology, environment, energy, infrastructure, ekphrasis, pop culture, sleep and dreams. I would also welcome proposals in any genre which take a post-internet approach in form and content. I look for PhD projects which are bold, experimental, critically-informed and often taking a hybrid approach to genre and craft.  

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Research Interests

My academic interests hinge on the question: how do literature and culture respond to, and intervene in, critical issues of climate breakdown, energy transition and technological change? I am passionate about collaborative, practise-led and interdisciplinary approaches to this question. My research is currently centred on the role of sleep and dreaming in literature, culture and daily life. With the sound artist Dr Kevin Leomo, I am one half of Project Somnolence: a portable lab for exploring the different ways people experience sleep, sleep disturbance and dreams. Funded by the University of Strathclyde and the Dear Green Bothy, Project Somnolence engages practice-based methods including poetry, music, performance scoring and participatory workshops in conversation with perspectives from psychology, philosophy and the environmental humanities. I was also recently lead on Brilliant Vibrating Interface: Queering the Post-Internet through Poetry and Practice - a year-long series of workshops - a year-long series of workshops, podcasts and editorial features leading up to a book-length publication and digital exhibition (funded by the Edwin Morgan Trust's The Second Life Award).

I am the author of over twenty creative print publications including chapbooks, exhibition books, collections and anthologies. My most recent poetry collection, Cinders, was published by the Bay Area press Krupskaya. Other works include The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021), String Feeling (Erotoplasty, 2022), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022), Cocoa and Nothing - with Colin Herd (SPAM Press, 2023) and An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023). With Rhian Williams, I co-edited an anthology, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020), and with Aaron Kent edited The Last Song: Words for Frightened Rabbit (Broken Sleep, 2023). A collection written with Ian Macartney, Languishing, cute, is forthcoming with Tapsalteerie in 2025, and a novella, The Indigo Hours, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books, also in 2025. My work has been widely anthologised and I have fulfilled creative commissions from musicians such as Lanark Artefax, North Sea Dialect and Zoee, and organisations such as the Alasdair Gray Archive and ArtWalkPorty. An exhibition with Jack O’Flynn and Katie O’Grady, The Palace of Humming Trees, was shown at French Street Studios (now Strangefield), Glasgow in 2021.  

I have published critical work on areas such as post-internet poetry, solarity, twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, literary representations of meadows, commoning and atmospheric imaginaries in anthropocene lyric. My doctoral work addressed the contested term ‘anthropocene’ by developing a practice of ‘hypercritique’: a performance of im/possibility, attunement and hold within conditions of mass extinction, Covid-19 and climate breakdown. The book version of this, Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) is forthcoming with NoUP Press in autumn 2024.

Community engagement is important to my work. I have run practise-led workshops and public events for organisations such as Beyond Form Creative Writing, Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, The 87 Press, Glasgow Goes Green Festival, Glasgow Science Festival, Glasgow Zine Festival, StAnza Festival, the Alasdair Gray Archive, Dear Green Bothy, Agile City and Book Week Scotland. These workshops focus on areas such as dream ecologies, sleep, the everyday, refusal and failure, experimental journaling, entanglement, poetry and pop music, trash poetics, weather and postcapitalist desire. My work as a writer, critic and collaborator has been highlighted in places such as It’s Nice That, The Guardian, Saltire Society, Scottish Contemporary Artists Network, BBC Radio 3, The White Review, Tank, Dazed, The Skinny and The Poetry Project. I have been commended in various literary prizes: most recently my debut collection The Luna Erratum was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Scottish Poetry Book of the Year (2022) and its follow-up, Visions & Feed, was shortlisted for ASLE-uki’s Creative Writing Prize (2023).

Professional Activities

Very Kevin: A Celebration of Kevin Killian
Host
28/10/2026
Intimacy, Collectivity & Work in Poetry: a free workshop with Joey Frances
Speaker
30/9/2026
How does a poem tell time? Workshop for StrathWrites Gala
Presenter
18/9/2026
Poetry reading at Good Press
Speaker
6/8/2026
Xing the Line 25th Anniversary Marathon Reading
Speaker
18/7/2026
Second Space performance
Speaker
2/7/2026

More professional activities

Projects

Creative and critical pedagogies: a practice sharing session
Sledmere, Maria (Principal Investigator) Widner, Jessica (Principal Investigator) Taylor, Yvette (Principal Investigator)
All Humanities and Education colleagues are welcome to join this informal, cross-faculty sharing session hosted by Yvette Taylor (Education), Maria Sledmere and Jessica Widner (English & Creative Writing). We will discuss pedagogies, practices and methods that are essential to our disciplines and look for points of convergence and possible collaboration. No registration required; just turn up with some thoughts to share about what creative practice and feedback methods mean to you in different contexts of teaching.
06-Jan-2026 - 06-Jan-2026
Presentation: Practice-based methods in Sleep Studies
Sledmere, Maria (Principal Investigator)
A presentation on practice-based research methods given at the Health & Environment Humanities in Focus session.
21-Jan-2026 - 21-Jan-2026
SGSAH Year 4 Cohort Event
Sledmere, Maria (Academic)
Contributed to a panel on PhD outputs taking place at DCA, Dundee, hosted by SGSAH.
04-Jan-2025 - 04-Jan-2025
Criticality and Creative Practice: training for practice-based students and their supervisors
Sledmere, Maria (Principal Investigator) Widner, Jessica (Co-investigator) Bernstein, Sarah (Co-investigator) Jones, Sophie (Co-investigator)
A one-day on campus student training event and follow-up supervisor webinar led by researchers based in Creative Writing, dedicated to supporting practice-based doctoral scholars with the critical component of their thesis.
01-Jan-2025 - 28-Jan-2026
Project Somnolence
Sledmere, Maria (Principal Investigator) Leomo, Kevin (Co-investigator)
Everyone sleeps and is affected by sleep, but we don’t all sleep the same. Sleep inequalities are associated with differences in class, gender and environmental factors. This project attends to sleep through issues of sustainability, health and wellbeing. It is an interdisciplinary, practice-led scoping project which affords opportunities for situating our research with different sites and publics across Scotland. The goal is to secure a bedrock of research partnership ahead of an AHRC Catalyst grant in 2024, building a network of contributors and stakeholders across HEIs, industry and wider publics.

Strathclyde is already home to the Strathclyde Centre for Sleep Health (based in the Department of Psychological Sciences & Health) and this project will address the knowledge gap of arts-based methods for engaging with sleep, forging cross-department opportunities for collaboration, REF-eligible output and future knowledge exchange. We will use creative-critical methods under a broadly environmental humanities approach to investigate somnolence (a desire for sleep) within discussions about ‘chronodiversity’ (the different ways people experience embodied time).

Real impact on global public health and sustainability can be achieved by improving societal understandings of sleep’s importance and the factors that affect it— from chronic stress to daylight savings. For Jonathan Crary, the 24/7 pulse of attention and demand within late capitalism encroaches upon our sleep health. The framing of 24/7 — from on-demand rolling news to social media and increasingly precarious labour patterns — normalises ‘the idea of working without pause, without limits’ (Crary). This conception of endless availability and accumulation is inextricable from the kinds of capitalist growth and extraction which have instigated planetary-scale levels of ecological crisis.

This project embodies Strathclyde values of innovation, boldness and collaboration. We will undertake a practice-research residency, an engagement tour visiting Scottish HEIs, arts organisations and schools, with a public-facing sharing event held at the end of this project. Given the success of our recent ‘Somnolent Cartographies’ session at Civic House (funded by UKRI NERC), we are confident that sleep ecologies is a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary interest with real potential for creative-critical innovation.

This includes building experimental methods around sleep, temporality, and ecology in a rural environment which provides a productive point of comparison to our ongoing urban-based research.
01-Jan-2024 - 31-Jan-2024
Suicide prevention in later life
Hafford-Letchfield, Trish (Co-investigator) Karastoyanova-Gibson, Konstantina (Co-investigator) Rasmussen, Susan (Co-investigator) Sledmere, Maria (Co-investigator)
01-Jan-2023 - 31-Jan-2028

More projects

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Contact

Dr Maria Sledmere
Senior Lecturer
English & Creative Writing

Email: maria.sledmere@strath.ac.uk
Tel: Unlisted