Biography
I joined LCAB in 2022 to take up a role as Postdoctoral Research Associate and was appointed Research Fellow in 2024. I completed my PhD in the School of English at the University of Sheffield in 2021, during which time I was a member of the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC). Before this, I received both my BA in English and History and MA in English Literature from Sheffield.
Research
My research takes place primarily in literary and film studies, and crosses the fields of Cold War culture, animal studies, the environmental humanities, posthumanism, and political ecology. I am an Associate Editor (Film/Cinema/Moving Image) at Society & Animals.
My first monograph (in progress) is entitled Paranoid Ecology: Animality, Relational Humanism, and Cold War Culture. It examines how the paranoid culture of the Cold War United States responded to existential anxieties about the future of humanity through the discourse of animality, which functioned both as a repressed substrate revealed by technoscientific advancements in immunology, palaeontology, and behaviourism, and as a condition for a glimmeringly technological evolutionary future. Situating canonical and lesser-known literary and filmic texts in dialogue with the scientific discourses through which they emerged, the book argues that technofuturism in the latter half of the twentieth century embraced the supposedly posthuman assertion that the human is just another animal.
Since 2022, I have been working on a second major project at LCAB entitled Cultures of Ecotechnology: From Avant-Garde to Ecomodern. Associated today with technologies such as de-extinction and geoengineering, ecotechnology is most readily associated with the human capacity for technological solutions to the problems of the Anthropocene. Yet the merging of environmental thought with technology in earlier twentieth century contexts produces ideas that trouble the one-size-fits-all logic of the techno-fix. The project investigates the latently hopeful articulations of technology that emerge from countercultural and underground publications and the interdisciplinary cultures they facilitate throughout the twentieth century. It also examines how contemporary art and fiction respond to these histories to provide counternarratives to prevailing modes of ecomodernism. Since 2026 the project has been supported by a Postdoctoral Research Associate, Alice Dodds, who is examining the modernist theory of ‘biotechnics’ as an interdisciplinary culture of ecotechnology in the British artistic press from 1923–52.
While working on the project, I have edited (with Sarah Bezan) a double issue of Configurations on ‘The Art and Science of Species Revival’, and (with John Miller) an issue of Green Letters on ‘Critical Psychedelic Studies and the Environmental Humanities’. At LCAB, I have worked on several collaborative interdisciplinary projects, including the edited book Animality and Horror Cinema (with Mo O’Neill and Sam Hind); an article on the intersection of political ecology and animal studies (with Rosaleen Duffy); an article on the dreams and desires that underpin the practice of rewilding (with Michael Stratigos et al.); and (with Harrie Neal and Jack Hatfield) an edited book for Bloomsbury entitled Rethinking Biodiversity in the Anthropocene that collates the interdisciplinary work conducted in the Centre.
Publication Highlights
Sands, Peter. 2026. Symbiosis on Acid. Published online ahead of print, Green Letters.
Sands, Peter. 2026. Game for the Challenge. Review of Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity by Tom Tyler. Humanimalia 16.2, 415–423.
Stratigos, Michael J., Sarah Bezan, Mark Jenner, Christopher Lyon, Harrie Neal, Hanna L. Pettersson, and Peter Sands. 2026. The Wild Imperative: Examining arguments for rewilding in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Review 13.1, 112–140.
Duffy, Rosaleen. and Peter Sands. 2026. Reanimate: Political ecologies of animals in European wildlife conservation. Published online ahead of print, Society & Animals.
Sands, Peter. 2026. Extinction, Cut-Up: Species Revival and Literary Ecomodernism. Configurations 34.1, 123–153.
Sands, Peter. 2025. Ecocriticism. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 33.1, 74–94.
Sands, Peter, Mo O’Neill and Samantha Hind (eds.) 2025. Animality and Horror Cinema: Creaturely Fear on Film. Cham: Palgrave.
Sands, Peter. 2024. Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney and the Species Politics of Risk. In Animals and Science Fiction ed. Nora Castle and Giulia Champion. Cham: Palgrave. pp. 75–92.
Sands, Peter. 2023. “Thanks a lot, big brain”: Satirical Misanthropy in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos. In Animal Satire ed. Susan McHugh and Robert McKay. Cham: Palgrave. pp. 291–312.
Sands, Peter. 2022. J.G. Ballard’s Fossil Imaginaries: Apocalypse, Deep Time, and Deathly Life. In Animal Remains ed. Sarah Bezan and Robert Mckay. New York: Routledge. pp. 15–33.