Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

Dr. Martell is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in literature, food, film, and the environment. She is the Fulbright-Queen's University Belfast Scholar in Irish Studies, 2025-2026.

Dr. Martell's essays, articles, and reviews have been published in fifteen journals and scholarly collections. She is the author of Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire (University of Nevada Press, 2020), which investigates the relationship between the industrial food of empire and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. She is also the co-editor of Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (University of Florida Press, 2019), a transnational exploration of global food chains and the modernist arts.

Dr. Martell teaches interdisciplinary courses in the Global Studies program and Watauga Residential College. Read more about her co-led Study Abroad program, "Peacebuilding and the Arts in Ireland and Northern Ireland," in this article.

Books

Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire. University of Nevada Press, 2020.

"Martell breaks new ground in modernist studies generally and is a must-read for any ecocritical modernist. I have no doubt that it will shift the way environmentalists approach texts so that the influence of agricultural changes and food politics becomes a regular feature of any ecocritical evaluation of literary modernism, just as animal studies and Anthropocene readings have now become central inquiries." -Modern Fiction Studies

"Farm to Form is a subtle and sophisticated investigation into the British Empire's food system: industrial production, transport, distribution. In essays on Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad, we learn about railways and dairy farming, steamships and New Zealand lamb, rationing and food controls during the First World War, and the beginnings of the climate catastrophe we face today. Martell persuasively makes the case for the period's food system, steeped in political and environmental significance, to be considered alongside war, transport, finance and mass communication, as an agent of culture." -Times Literary Supplement

Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde. University of Florida Press, 2019. Co-edited with Adam Fajardo and Philip Keel Geheber.

"This delicious collection traverses the globe—potatoes in Ireland, eggs in New Zealand, mangoes in Bengal—and explores the sensuous qualities of artistic modernism in its many forms—cinema, short story, manifesto, cuisine." -Catherine Keyser, author of Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture

Recent Publications

"The Vine at the End of the World: Reimagining Kudzu." Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics. Ed. Lesley Wylie. Liverpool University Press, 2023. Co-authored.

"Vorticism in the Age of Climate Change." Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature. Eds. Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre. Lexington Books, 2021.

"Cormac McCarthy's 'Bogfolk': Apocalypse, Fertility Rites, and Irish History in The Road." Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies. Eds. Kirsten L. Squint, Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Anthony Wilson. Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Co-authored.

"Food Sovereignty, the Irish Homestead, and the First World War." Modernist Cultures 13, no. 3 (Autumn 2018): 399-416. doi:10.3366/mod.2018.0219.

Recent Courses

GLS 4530: Empire and Peacebuilding in Ireland and Northern Ireland (Summer Study Abroad)
HON 3515: Borders, Walls, and Post-Conflict Stories
GLS 4000: Manifestos and Global Movements
GLS 2000: Screening the Postcolonial World
WRC 1103: Critical Perspectives on Food
WRC 2202: Transatlantic Ireland