ProfessorPhilip Armstrong

I teach literary studies (especially Shakespeare) and (at graduate level) creative writing.

My research involves analysis of the ways in which the natural world is represented in culture and literature.  My scholarly books include Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature (Routledge 2025), Sheep (Reaktion 2016), A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in our Culture, History and Everyday Life (co-authored with Annie Potts and Deidre Brown, Auckland University Press 2013), What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (Routledge 2008), Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2001), and Shakespeare's Visual Regime (Palgrave 2000).

My creative work, which includes poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction, has been published in a range of journals and anthologies in Aotearoa, Australia, the UK, and the USA. I have published two collections of poetry: Sinking Lessons (Otago University Press 2020), which won the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry in 2019, and Touch Screen (Otago University Press 2025). "Tenuous Grounds", a piece on the Canterbury earthquakes, won the 2011 Landfall Essay Prize.