Dr Megan Maree Hayes
- Postdoctoral Research Associate
Megan is a researcher, writer, and artist. Her projects explore the effects and aesthetics of encounter between the porous bodies of our planet.
Megan is the Postdoctoral Research Associate for Toxic Heritage: Socio natural Landscapes of Extraction and Pollution in the Harz and Cornwall, a project jointly funded by the AHRC and DFG. She received her PhD in
Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon (2025), where her dissertation, "How to Love an Oyster,” investigated oyster-human relations across coastal sites in the United States, Australia, and Europe. The central argument of this project, which will become Megan’s first book, is that cultures of reciprocal tenderness between oysters and humans afford critical insights for building anti
oppressive worlds, in which wellbeing must be conceived on egalitarian and planetary terms.
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Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Hayes, M. (2025). Body/Litmus. In: K. Flannery, R. Mawani, and M. Stelder, eds., Oceans as Archives. London: Routledge, pp. 145-157.
Hayes, M. (2024). Held Together: Learning Attachment from Oysters. In: R. Murray and V. Fibisan, eds., Blue Extinction in Literature, Art, and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 93-108.
Diamanti, J. And Hayes, M. (2020). Intermodal Aesthetics and the Otherwise of Cargo. In: T. Prorokova, ed., Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, pp. 173-190.