John Parham's research lies in environmental humanities, notably Victorian literature and ecology and eco-media studies. He has written, edited and co-edited six books: Green Media and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan: 2016); Literature and Sustainability: Exploratory Essays (co-edited with Adeline Johns-Putra and Louise Squire) (Manchester University Press, 2017); A Global History of Literature and the Environment (co-edited with Louise Westling) (Cambridge University Press, 2017); The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2021); a book on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (Rodopi: 2010), and a further edited collection, The Environmental Tradition in English Literature (Ashgate: 2002). John has published articles on several Victorian writers (including Charles Dickens, William Morris, and Emile Zola), contemporary literature, green popular culture (looking at British and Australian punk, film, computer games, and digital climate fiction), and on teaching cultural studies and environmental studies. For 20 years, John was co-editor of the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (published by Taylor & Francis).
At the University, John is Professor of Environmental Humanities and course leader for the Arts and Humanities MRes programme. He teaches modules in green media, the new humanities and research methods. John also leads the university’s Green Voices Research Group who have held events, in Worcester, with the nature writers Caspar Henderson and Richard Kerridge, and the photographer David Plummer, as well as a conference on ‘Enchanted Environments’ at the University of Worcester Art House in 2020.